The United Kingdom will likely be adding a new smartphone friendly transaction service.
According to a recent announcement, the United Kingdom may soon be adding a brand new mobile payments platform to its offerings and will involved every major bank in the country.
When this comes together, it could be an important example for how financial institutions can collaborate.
The British banks will be working together for this mobile payments platform and may help to provide an example of how other financial institutions around the world can work together in order to make this type of transaction more widespread and to help to provide a more universal experience.
This type of partnership among banks can help to make mobile payments a lot more widespread.
The mobile payments service will be called Zapp and it was initially launched by VocaLink. That company is the collectively owned ATM and transaction network by the British banks. This will simply expand on the type of smartphone transaction service that is available in a similar way that other types of transactions have already been spread.
The Zapp mobile payments service will allow consumers to link their smartphone numbers to their bank accounts. This way, it will let these shoppers use their devices to send money in several different ways and for many different purposes. For example, it will allow everything from paying bills over smartphones to making peer to peer funds transfers.
The announcement revealed that the mobile payments platform has received funding from VocaLink worth £16 million, so far, and that it will still require an additional £100 million in order to bring it up to the ability to launch in 2014, as is intended.
Many different mobile payments platforms are currently launching all over the world, including in the United Kingdom. However, this will be among the first of its kind in terms of collaboration across all major banks in the country. The transactions have been very slow to take off, but it could be just this type of service that may make the difference to convince both businesses and consumers to adopt this cashless form of payment.
