Thirteen IoT-focused companies signed deals with Visa to integrate the payment giant’s secure platform into a wide range of devices.

Manufacturers and system integrators signing up to the Visa Token Service partner programme can add payment facilities to a range of consumer and industrial IoT devices, with tokens used to avoid wide distribution of bank details.

In a statement, Visa said global partnerships were now in place with wearable contactless payment specialist FitPay, IT firm Infosys and semiconductor company Rambus. The company also signed single region agreements with PayCraft, Mahindra Comviva, Digiseq, FOO, Pri-Num, Seglan, HST, Prosa, VeriTran and YellowPepper.

Visa launched the partner programme in October 2016 in a bid to widen the scope of its service, with Giesecke & Devrient, Gemalto and Inside Secure its first three members.

Jim McCarthy, EVP for innovation and strategic partnerships at Visa, said: “A potential tidal wave of new payment accounts is approaching – conservative estimates expect 21 billion Internet-connected devices in just three more years, so having both the partner network and the right technology in place are fundamental to driving payments on those devices.”

Jordan McKee, principal analyst at 451 Research, said Visa’s move comes at a time when consumers increasingly expect to be “able to purchase goods and services at any given time or place on the device of their choosing,”

“To meet these elevated demands, commerce stakeholders must collaborate on approaches such as tokenisation to ensure security and usability are maintained at scale.”