After launching its revolutionary mobile number money transfer smartphone app Pingit last week, UK bank Barclays saw more than 20,000 downloads in the first two days, leaving its rivals scrambling to launch their own mobile services.
UK banks including Royal Bank of Scotland, which owns NatWest, and Lloyds Banking Group are reported to be looking to launch a similar service to Pingit. Barclays launched its own service that jumped ahead of a proposed industry standard by the Payments Council, which is said to be more than a year away from seeing the light of day.
With the app initially available to Barclays customers to send and receive money, Pingit will soon roll out to any banking customer in the UK, as long as they have a current account and a mobile phone number. As This Is Money reports, rivals banks powerless to stop their customers using Pingit, with one source admitting: “there is nothing we can do to stop our customers signing up to the service.”
The service first requires a bank customer to link their current account with their mobile number, enabling payments to be sent directly to that account with just a phone number for reference. To send funds, users can download the free Barclays Pingit app (available on iOS, Android and BlackBerry) or sign-up to receive mobile transfers by registering online.
Each transaction is protected by a five-digit passcode, which is set by the user, and transfers can be between £1 and £300 with a maximum of £5,000 per day.
The service is aimed not only at helping friends and family send payments between accounts, small business owners will also be able to register numbers on the service and receive payments for goods and services, without the need for a credit card machine.
Thanks for your post Matt - it certainly has taken off very quickly, and it's no surprise really, considering mobile is increasingly important.
I definitely think it's a step forward for the UK but there are other forms of mobile payment that are actually more advanced elsewhere so we still have a long way to go, - we discussed this further and this may be of interest to you http://379.at/vVgH
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LikeWhat Barclays' Pingit (http://www.barclays.co.uk/pingit) does in Britain sounds very much like what Dwolla does here in the U.S., up to the pricing, because, while Pingit is free, Dwolla charges $0.10 per transaction above $10 (anything below that is free). The thing is that, if a British bank is doing it, soon enough its American cousins will start doing it too and I just don't see how Dwolla could compete with them as a stand-alone service. After all, Dwolla has to charge something, however small the amount, while the banks apparently do not. For analysis: http://blog.unibulmerchantservices.com/barclays-pingit-shows-why-dwolla-like-start-ups-stand-no-chance
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LikeNice! That's a pretty good download success so far. While other mobile P2P services are around in the UK, this is the first one launched by a major player. I'm lucky I bank with them and can use it to send and received funds.
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LikeGeorg Fasching Monitise are behind quite a few of the big banks mobile payments although they've not got much public exposure yet as they're more behind the scenes. http://www.monitisegroup.com/about_us/our_clients
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