15,000 customers using Bankwest Halo ring

Bankwest has sold its Halo ‘tap and go’ payment ring to around 15,000 of its 1.1 million customers almost one year after its launch.

These customers used the $39 wearable device – an alternative to cash or a contactless card – for 28 per cent of their purchases in 2018, the bank said on Tuesday.

Bankwest’s executive general manager, customer solutions and insights, Pieter Vorster, said the speed at which using the Bankwest Halo has become the norm for those customers shows how flexible they are in the manner in which they want to pay for goods and services.

“The popularity of the Bankwest Halo, coupled with the 88 per cent increase in logins to our mobile app that we’ve seen over the last three years, clearly shows how Australians are adapting to today’s digital landscape with some of the highest adoption rates in the developed world,” he said.

Payments made on the ring accounted for 38 per cent of all debit transactions made by these customers in December.

Vorster said there were clear patterns in the customer experience and usage of the Bankwest Halo.

“When the ring first arrives in the post it seems, perhaps understandably, the customer is a little wary and will test the waters by buying a few low-value items first. Bit, after a few days, they’re getting used to it and the value of the transactions they make go up and soon it becomes their main method of paying at the till,” he said.

Bankwest has been embarking on a digital transformation that executive GM, technology and transformation Andy Weir said last June was ‘absolutely about survival.’

At the time, Weir said he been “absolutely blown away” by the take up of Halo, which won two awards at last year’s RFI Australian Retail Banking Awards.

“At a time when the whole world is clamouring towards Apple Pay and paying with [smartphones], we have tried to push ahead of that and show something that is even more convenient and a step closer to biometric payments which believe me, are not going to be very far away,” Weir said at the time.

Meanwhile, Bankwest this week joined the growing list of banks in Australia adopting the Apple Pay platform.

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