UK companies will soon receive m-payments platform which sends payments instantly via Pingit or Paym.

British multinational banking and financial service company, Barclays, has teamed up with digital banking solutions provider, Bottomline Technologies, to offer UK businesses an instant mobile payments platform that will enable businesses to send payments fast and directly to customers via their mobile phone number. The platform is Bottomline Technologies’ C-Series payments processing module and will enable payments to be sent through Barclays’ Pingit mobile app or the Barclays-supported Paym mobile payment platform.

The transactions can be made without requiring the bank account details of consumers.

The businesses that use the service – companies ranging from utilities to insurers – will be able to make instant mobile payments, which also includes refunds, directly to consumers with just their phone numbers. No bank account details are needed.

With the service, consumers can make payments nearly immediately via their mobile phone, whether it’s to pay a gas bill or for travel fares. On the flip side, businesses can pay their customers without having to handle the sensitive bank account details, reported The Financial Times.

To use the instant mobile payments service, consumers and companies must be registered with Paym or Pignit.

In order to use the service, consumers and companies must be registered with either Paym or Pingit. That said, recipients who want to receive a payment through their phone number do not have to bank with Barclays, nor do they need to have a smartphone to use Pignit.

Furthermore, according to Bottomline, “If a recipient wants to receive a payment via their phone number but is not registered to either service, they will receive an SMS inviting them to register to Pingit within five days.”

That said, for businesses, the service does require a Barclays Corporate UK bank account.

Combined, both Pignit and Paym cover more than five million accounts in the UK. Bottomline stated that “There are already over 3 million phone numbers registered with Pingit and over 3 million registered with Paym.”

Pingit managing director, Darren Foulds, commented on the instant mobile payments platform saying that it is a payment solution that will offer additional security as well as faster speed and convenience for companies and their customers.

Game designers in Newfoundland are breaking ground with a new type of virtual reality (VR) game.

Other Ocean Interactive, a game studio based out of St. John’s, Newfoundland is developing a VR video game called Giant Cop: Justice Above All. This interactive game will be one of the world’s first commercial virtual reality games and is a new type of game that promises to change how a player sees the world…mostly because they’re actually a giant police officer in charge of keeping a tiny-sized city safe.

Solve murders and literally throw criminals in jail.

The game, which is slated for a fall release will transform players into a giant police officer when they put on a compatible VR headset. The object of the game is to patrol the tiny streets of Micro City. In the open world game, players control the actions of Giant Cop with their physical movements as they move around the virtual landscape, which requires them to walk around in their own physical environment. The goal of the player is to manage the city as they see fit. They can enforce the law with a soft hand or an iron fist. How the citizens of the city view the player depends on the player’s actions.

According to Other Ocean Interactive’s studio head Ryan Hale, “If you’re not a careful giant cop, you might actually hurt the city that you’re trying to protect.”

Giant Cop was inspired by popular 1970’s and 1980’s cop shows, like Shaft and Starsky and Hutch, and is a satire of these shows as well as humorous take on modern day events like NSA digging through phone data or email.

The game’s producer Stephen Jeffers explained that “Almost like the old TV shows. We drew a lot of inspiration from things like Starsky and Hutch and Streets of San-Francisco.” Jeffers says that despite the unique VR experience, the game is propelled by its storytelling, reported CBC News.

The studio behind the upcoming VR video game wants to keep its operations local.

Other Ocean has been pushed into the spotlight due to the buzz surrounding its upcoming game. However, even though the studio, one of the pioneers in the VR industry, has now evolved from a local level to a global scale, Jeffers said that the company hires locally and wants to keep people in Newfoundland, preventing them from leaving the island for work.

Giant Cop is presently in development for several virtual reality platforms. Among these include the PlayStation VR, Vive and Oculus. Ocean plans to release its VR video game in the fall, just in time for the 2016 holiday season.