Nymi partners with NXP Semiconductors to demo biometric wristband

Toronto’s Nymi will be showing off its collaboration with Dutch company NXP Semiconductors over the next couple days at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, providing a demo of their upcoming Nymi Band, a wristband that uses a wearer’s unique cardiac rhythm to securely enable contactless payments and provide security access using NFC and biometric authentication.
Nymi is promising to launch the Nymi Band for enterprise later in 2016.
In October, Nymi announced a partnership with MasterCard that would allow wearers of the Nymi Band to pay for things using Nymi’s proprietary HeartID electrocardiogram technology to biometrically authenticate the wearer’s identity.
NXP, who had already been collaborating with MasterCard as part of their larger contactless payment partnership program, has provided Nymi with the Nymi Band’s Secure Element and NFC components to facilitate the secure functionality of the authentication process.
“Wearable solutions like the Nymi Band use advanced security technology to bring more convenience to people’s lives,” said NXP Vice Present of Cybersecurity Solutions Sami Nassar. “Using NXP’s secure element, wearable turnkey solutions like the Nymi Band can provide physical access to open enterprise or home doors, provide logical access to cloud services like email and data storage services and enable secure contactless payments.”
NXP is a global company, with 45,000 employees in 35 countries.
“The past year has been instrumental in shaping Nymi’s vision for our upcoming launch, and the alliances we have forged during that time with partners such as NXP are an essential part of our go-to-market strategy,” said Nymi Founder and CTO Karl Martin. “Our ultimate goal is to transform authentication into a persistent and frictionless experience, and NXP has been a pivotal part of bringing that vision to life.”
Nymi will be presenting demo versions of other applications at the RSA Conference, at the NXP booth (#S1547) between March 1st and March 3rd, including the Nymi Band’s ability to lock and unlock a computer through a wearer’s proximity, as well as TOTP (Time-based One-Time Password) token generation and the wristband’s biometrically authenticated payment feature.