Barclays has entered into an agreement with Verifone, a payments technology company. The agreement will help the bank to have faster mobile payments across 20,000 retailers. It can thereby take on rival PayPal. Customers of any bank paying for goods on a mobile device can use Barclays’ Pingit app instead of having to type in information regarding payment card details or a shipping address. For retailers, the payments are instantaneous. Ashok Vaswani, chief executive of Barclays Personal and Corporate Banking, said the aim of the agreement is to ‘end the frustration’ caused by mobile checkout failure, partly because of the cumbersome process of entering long card numbers. Barclays pioneered Pingit as a way for customers to pay other people using their mobile phone number, which was then broadened to enable thousands of businesses to accept payments via the app. The bank is now working with Verifone to broaden Pingit to allow people to pay at shop terminals.
