Japanese credit card scheme JCB is collaborating with Singapore's Keychain to develop a a secure infrastructure for processing credit-based micropayments between IoT devices.
The innovation seeks to enable direct human-to-machine and machine-to-machine payments at scale without the confines of credit cards.
The initiative will exploit Keychain's distributed ledger infrastructure to reduce operational risks related to data security by providing each IoT device with a unique, blockchain-based, self-sovereign identity associated with customer identity.
The arrival of 5G networks is expected to lead to a surge in growth of IoT devices. Mobile payment apps enabled the common mobile user to pay with their phone, however the current payment infrastructure does not support tens of billions of IoT devices.
The go-to-market plan consists of enhancing the technology, practical real-world pilots, production infrastructure build out during 2021, and go-live in 2022.