Kerv Payments Ring Enters Production with Visa, Mastercard on Board

The Kerv contactless payments ring, a Kickstarter-backed project that reached its funding goal in October 2015, has begun production.

When the rings ship to Kickstarter backers, they will be able to support payments from a linked Visa or Mastercard credit or debit card. Shortly thereafter, the company plans to support funding from PayPal and American Express accounts, Kerv founder Philip Campbell wrote in an Aug. 5 message to the backers.

Kerv originally planned to mail rings in April, but its production schedule ran into delays for reasons related to the manufacturing process, the technical solution and the supporting payments ecosystem, Campbell wrote.

Within a week, Kerv plans to update its website to allow users of its contactless payment ring to register the device and manage transactions.

"We'll be testing a batch of production rings shortly, and within a couple of weeks we’ll be meeting up with some of our Kickstarter backers to demonstrate the final product and get some initial feedback," Campbell wrote. "After that we’ll be producing an initial batch to send out to Kickstarters; on successful fulfillment of that batch we’ll be shipping the remainder to all of you as our first priority. We will need to get each of these early production runs tested and approved prior to moving onto the next."

Though the project has encountered delays, the timing of this update comes at a crucial time for Kerv. A rival product, the NFC Ring, is working with Visa to test and promote a payments-enabled version of the NFC Ring at the Rio Olympic Games and offers preorders of the ring on its website (an earlier version of NFC Ring, also a Kickstarter-backed project, did not support payments).