Barclays Bank is to roll out a stand-alone contactless payment service for Android phone users ahead of the forthcoming launch of Google's Android Pay service in the UK.
Android Pay is due to make its debut in the UK in the coming months with support from some of the country's biggest banks, including HSBC and Lloyds. Barclays is taking advantage of the open source qualities of Android to launch its own service on the Barclaycard app, which offers support for HCE-based NFC mobile payments.
Slated for launch in June, Barclays customers with an eligible NFC-enabled Android phone will be able to tap and pay for transactions below the £30 limit at any of the 400,000 contactless locations in the UK. The service also allows contactless payments of between £30 and £100 by a tap of the mobile device, entering of the card’s normal PIN on the phone keypad, and tapping again.
Barclays say as many as five million of its customers use its mobile banking app, with average access running at 27 log-ins per month.
Ashok Vaswani, CEO of Barclays UK, said: “Giving customers the choice about how to make everyday payments while making it really easy for people to use our services is why we’ve designed this new contactless payment functionality which will sit at the heart of our already popular mobile banking app. It’s all there, in one place, ready to go with no need to enter card details, delivering a brilliant experience in an instant."