Tag: mobile payments uk

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.

The bank from the United Kingdom let it slip that the mobile payments service will be available in March.

U.K. bank, Barclays, has accidentally let it slip that Apple Pay is not just headed to its customers but that it is known exactly when it will be arriving and, according to the large financial institution, that will be in March.

The bank been the only major financial institution in the U.K. that hasn’t supported Apple’s mobile payments.

Customers at Barclays were the only ones with accounts at a large bank in the country that didn’t have the NFC technology based mobile payments from Apple Pay available to them. The service first became available last year in July, but the bank chose not to support those contactless payments for its iPhone carrying customers. However, the bank has now inadvertently provided confirmation that it will be arriving in March.

It was the CEO who accidentally let the release date of Apple Pay slip, when replying to an impatient customer’s email.

Ashok Vaswani, the CEO of Barclays, replied to an impatient customer’s email on January 12, giving confirmation that it would become possible to use an iPhone to complete mobile payments transactions within “60 to 75 days” of that time. That slip was all it took to provide a solid idea of when Apple’s mobile wallet would become available to customers of the bank as that is the only wallet app that is supported by the iPhone.

If Vaswani’s range of dates is accurate, it will mean that the iPhone’s mobile wallet will become available to Barclays customers at some point between March 13 and March 28. Still, despite the slip, the bank has yet to actually issue an official confirmation of the dates.

This will have Barclays joining Lloyds, Halifax, and every other large bank in the United Kingdom in offering Apple Pay to iPhone using customers. The reason for the delay in supporting the mobile wallet has not been offered by the bank. That said, it has been implied that there has been a disagreement between Apple and the bank with regards to the terms of supporting the service.