The recent announcement that these two giants were partnering together has also revealed a plan for transactions.
Verifone recently revealed that it was entering into a deal with Barclays that would have the two companies working together, and now it has stated that it will be integrating with Pingit, the British banking giant’s mobile payments technology.
This would bring the smartphone payments service to retailers that use Verifone’s transaction services.
This means that it will bring mobile payments together for Pingit’s 20,000 clients and add on the 70,000 businesses in the U.K. who are already Verifone transaction service customers. This could potentially be a stepping stone for the companies that could take the services more broadly throughout Europe. According to June Felix, the president of Verifone Europe, “What prompted the partnership, was a focus on Verifone’s part to help our retailer clients to enable commerce through every channel possible, whether it’s mobile, terminal or Web.”
The partnership sets the stage for a broad scale expansion of mobile payments that could occur quite quickly.
Felix explained that Barclays is “very innovative and very well-established player in terms of consumer payment,” when taking into consideration its solid position in the United Kingdom, which is already among the largest European markets. She also pointed out that Pingit provides a “unique value proposition.”
By partnering with Barclays for its smartphone payments transactions to add the option to the Verifone physical countertop terminals, it makes it possible for Verifone to step outside its previous confines of those terminals into mobile shopping areas. This is an angle that it has never before been able to take.
It also remains a type of transaction of which many consumers remain completely unaware. With large names such as these, there is the potential to change that in the United Kingdom, so that consumers will learn about the technology and choose whether or not they want to use it.
Verifone isn’t without its experience in mobile payments, as – according to Felix – the company was “very involved” in the entry of Apple Pay into the United Kingdom’s marketplace. “The partnership with Pingit is really very consistent with that,” she said.
In the past, companies releasing new payments services have shown relatively little confidence in these services, which has had a significant impact on consumer adoption. Consumers have expressed concerns over modern payment services as well and this lack of confidence may be making mobile payments, as a whole, unattractive to consumers. 