DIGISEQ Partners with ekko to Embed Sustainability and Positive Planet Impact into Wearable Devices

Alternative Finance
12.09.2023 10:20 am

DIGISEQ, the wearable payments tech pioneer, has today announced its partnership with ekko, the global embedded sustainability fintech, bringing ekko’s carbon tracking, offsetting and positive planet impact platform to consumers using DIGISEQ enabled devices.

Under this partnership, DIGISEQ will integrate ekko’s infrastructure into its management app, so that each transaction using the customer’s wearable device can be monitored to deliver real-time carbon tracking to the consumer via a quick access dashboard. Customers can then choose to act from a range of positive actions, such as carbon offsetting, saving plastic bottles from entering our oceans or reforestation around the world.

As part of the partnership, ekko is also the first UK card provider to announce its plan to offer DIGISEQ’s vegan-friendly apple skin contactless key fobs to its customers and partnering businesses. The new ekko multi-purpose fobs will be made available to both consumers and businesses in the coming months. The DIGISEQ-powered fobs can be used as digital ID or access control devices for employees – all thanks to DIGISEQ’s mobile provisioning platform, RCOS™.

RCOS™ enables real-time payment data to be provisioned to a wearable item over-the-air, providing customers with multiple services and the freedom to choose how to pay. The solution is available for any Android and iOS device by downloading DIGISEQ’s white-labelled Manage Mii^TM mobile app, which can instantly deliver Mastercard payment data via secure tokenisation to the wearable item.

The announcement of the partnership coincides with the launch of DIGISEQ’s season 2 podcast series, which starts with Angela and Oli in discussion on how financial services can form an important part of our collective challenge to live more sustainably.

Oli Cook, Co-Founder and CEO at ekko, comments: “I’m delighted to be able to announce this partnership. Enabling DIGISEQ customers to embed sustainability into their wearables is another major milestone in our growth and impact. DIGISEQ are a business who are working on their approach to sustainability and how their core business can be a force for good so working together on this journey is very exciting.”

“I’m truly passionate about the opportunity we in the fintech community and beyond have to help consumers to understand their choices and make better decisions. Whether that be financially better decisions or environmentally”

Angela Davies, Head of Partnerships at DIGISEQ, added: “DIGISEQ is delighted to be working with ekko to deliver such a powerful eco-friendly payment tool to consumers worldwide. We recognise how critical the visibility of our own environmental impact is to changing behaviours, and alongside the ability to make those offsetting decisions quickly and easily, we can also make a huge difference.

“At DIGISEQ, sustainability is incredibly important, and we believe that offering customers the ability to add multiple services to one device, manufactured from sustainable and recyclable materials, can help tackle the huge volume of plastic that many of us carry around in our wallets and pockets. With this fob, ekko is not just removing plastic cards, but also giving its customers an ongoing ability to reduce their own carbon emissions, and incentivising transactions that directly contribute to eco-friendly initiatives. It’s a full-circle functionality that we’re delighted to support.”

DIGISEQ’s mobile personalisation and tokenisation ensures all provisioned payment data is fully protected, with contactless transactions secured in the same way as card or phone NFC payments. By promoting use of wearable tech, brands, banks, and issuers can reduce their reliance on producing plastic cards, as DIGISEQ handles the over-the-air personalisation and payment enablement of the wearable item from end to end, saving banks and distributors vast amounts of time and money. Additionally, this also helps to significantly reduce the amount of plastic used for cards, improving environmental and sustainability efforts.

DIGISEQ’s ground-breaking technology is revolutionising wearable payments by allowing consumers to register and activate their own item using their payment card, through DIGISEQ’s Manage Mii^TM mobile app, which can be white-labelled with the branding of its clients, making it an invisible payments partner.