Interest in harnessing wearable technology as a payments facilitator is on the rise, with Bendigo Bank and Visa both announcing developments in the area.Wearable payment devices came into the spotlight in April when Heritage Bank auctioned off a man's business suit with an embedded Visa PayWave chip and antenna allowing wearers to make a payment by simply swiping their sleeve over a contactless payment terminal.While the business suit was little more than a gimmick, there is rising interest in the potential of wearable technology as a payments device.Bendigo Bank yesterday demonstrated how a Samsung smartwatch could be used to make a purchase using its recently launched redy mobile payments system. It has released the app for the Samsung Gear 2 smartwatch initially, but also pledged to offer payments capabilities for other wearable devices in the future.Visa, meanwhile, has just announced Visa Digital Solutions comprising the standards, tools and services that the company said would allow any internet connected device - including wearables - to be used to make a payment.Core to this is cloud based tokenisation, where a unique token is assigned to every transaction, replacing the 16-digit credit card number. This should improve security, and also allow innovative payments applications to be developed which link the unique payments token with any number of internet connected devices - from cars, to fridges or smart watches.Tokenisation is scheduled to be available from September, with the full suite of Visa tools slated for release early in 2015.Closer to home, Google Glass is being trialled by Westpac in New Zealand and St George Bank in Australia, with the banks committed to launching a wearable banking application as soon as the device is available in Australia. Internationally, PayPal has also run payment pilots using Samsung smartwatches.Analyst Ovum believes that wearables will remain largely an adjunct to smartphone payment apps, with the watch or embedded NFC chip taking care of just the final swipe in the payments process.Longer term it suggests that cloud based payments platforms (such as that being rolled out by Visa) will allow even more futuristic payment methods to be devised using biometrics such as fingerprint scans or facial recognition to initiate payments.Mobile Payments Insider reported that Apple would include fingerprint technology in the development of a new mobile payment solution that it is said to be working on with Visa.