Muse Wearables, incubated at IIT Madras, has partnered with the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) to launch India’s first wearable payments platform. The startup’s product, Ring One, allows users to make contactless payments via RuPay simply by tapping the ring at NFC terminals, eliminating the need for phones, wallets, or cards.
At the core of the system is Muse Wallet, which converts linked RuPay credit or debit cards into secure tokens stored in a tamper-resistant Secure Element (SE) chip inside the ring. The actual card data never leaves the chip, offering enhanced security compared with software-based wallets.
“With Muse Wallet, we are making cashless payments effortless,” said KLN Sai Prasanth, CEO. The hardware tokenization approach isolates payment logic from smartphones, reducing risks from malware and side-channel attacks.
Ring One is designed for both domestic and international adoption. Muse currently operates in over 40 countries and supports cards from nearly 600 banks. The plan is to scale rapidly, enabling millions of RuPay cardholders to make wearable payments.
However, adoption faces several challenges: merchant acceptance of tokenized wearables, interoperability with varied terminals and banking protocols, regulatory certification, and building consumer trust. NPCI’s backing helps ensure legitimacy, but success will depend on partnerships, certification, user education, and real-world reliability.
The move reflects a broader goal of financial sovereignty in India by building tokenization and payment logic locally, reducing reliance on foreign platforms and data pipelines. While incremental rather than revolutionary, Muse Ring One represents a step toward embedding financial computing into everyday objects, signaling the next frontier of payments could move from screens to the body.
As the fintech ecosystem matures, products like Ring One highlight a shift toward seamless, personal, and secure payment experiences, combining wearable technology with India’s growing digital payments infrastructure.
Also read: Viksit Workforce for a Viksit Bharat
Do Follow: The Mainstream formerly known as CIO News LinkedIn Account | The Mainstream formerly known as CIO News Facebook | The Mainstream formerly known as CIO News Youtube | The Mainstream formerly known as CIO News Twitter |The Mainstream formerly known as CIO News Whatsapp Channel | The Mainstream formerly known as CIO News Instagram
About us:
The Mainstream formerly known as CIO News is a premier platform dedicated to delivering latest news, updates, and insights from the tech industry. With its strong foundation of intellectual property and thought leadership, the platform is well-positioned to stay ahead of the curve and lead conversations about how technology shapes our world. From its early days as CIO News to its rebranding as The Mainstream on November 28, 2024, it has been expanding its global reach, targeting key markets in the Middle East & Africa, ASEAN, the USA, and the UK. The Mainstream is a vision to put technology at the center of every conversation, inspiring professionals and organizations to embrace the future of tech.
