Hello! Last week I set up NFC payments with a wearable and have to admit that I am pretty happy with it, tho this is not endorsement to any company and i think it still can be a better option. my setup was simply:

Curve as the card issuer
Tapster as the wearable issuer
FidesmoPay as the payment technology

About Curve

Curve is not a bank, but just a wallet, this means a simple frontend for all your cards. They send you a card and in the app you connect all your different cards. I would put the card in my phone case and that would already "Make my phone enabled for NFC payments"

The positive:

The free tier comes with the possibility to add up to 3 of your cards, for more you will need to pay. I went for a paid subscription as it comes with several features that I found attractive but there is no need to do so.
You go to the app, select the card that you want to use and just use the Curve card and will redirect the payment to the selected card.
Once I received the card, the setup was really simple, also paying with it is quite easy too.

The negative:

Customer support is really slow, I connected to a VPN and tried to do a payment , my card was swiftly paused as it was coming from a weird place, which is nice. But to unpause it took 2 to 3 days which is no good. For that I always will have at least one card with me
The app needs google play services, I have it in the private space, and the play services without permissions, nor network nor sensors. So probably it just because of a library but not sure, as its closed source can not say.

About Tapster

This is more than an extra that i was curious, They sell wearables with NFC with FidesmoPay which is a like GooglePay without the google.

The positive:

Setup was really easy, i enabled NFC in the phone, loaded the curve card and that's it, nothing more is needed.

The negative:

You are giving more information to an extra company and I usually dislike to do so.

About FidesmoPay

Nothing much to say, is the underlying technology for contactless payments, its implemented in several brands of smartwatches like swatch or polar, among different wearables

Closing notes

As a synthesis, I found just making a curve account and putting the card on my phone case is all I needed just to make it work, as I can switch cards in the app and then put my phone close to it. The wearable is a nice touch not to even take out the phone, making it faster but if you have to switch cards you will still need to take out the phone. I honestly hope some day FidesmoPay, offer an app that does the same as google wallet, would be amazing.

Finally take in consideration that my use case of grapheneos and googleless style is about regaining control of my communications and information on my phone and not so much on where and how I pay, tho I understand this is too critical information.