Tag: pingit

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 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.