/article-new/2015/07/Barclays-Apple-Pay-UK-250x161.jpg?lossy)
Apple Pay launched in the United Kingdom in July at more than 250,000 locations across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, but Barclays remains notably absent from the group of banks supporting the mobile payments service.
Nevertheless, Barclays remains committed to supporting Apple Pay in the future. Barclays CEO of Personal and Corporate Banking Ashok Vaswani today told customer Mike Jobson by email that the bank plans to roll out Apple Pay in early 2016.
We have signed up for ApplePay and will launch it very early in the New Year. We truly value your custom and hope that you continue to bank with us particularly since we are launching this shortly.
A high-level executive at Barclays previously stated the bank anticipated "imminent" support of Apple Pay, and the bank later publicly confirmed it will support Apple Pay in the "future," but no specific launch timeframe had been provided.
Barclays is the only major financial institution of the "Big Four" banks in the U.K. that has yet to adopt Apple Pay. Participating banks include Bank of Scotland, First Direct, Halifax, HSBC, Lloyds Bank, M&S Bank, MBNA, Nationwide, NatWest, Royal Bank of Scotland, Santander and Ulster Bank.
MacRumors has contacted Barclays for comment.
Top Rated Comments
(View all)When you look at how long the universe has been here, 4-8 months is imminent.
When you look at the lifespan of a May Fly...Because someone decided to double-down on all the cash the had already sunk into the Barclays bPay system.
I would be amazed if more than a handful of customers switch banks solely for reasons relating to Apple Pay.So now they have a clumsy uncompetitive homebrew payment system, no Apple Pay until half a year after their competitors, and are likely seeing a customer out flux.
I wonder if heads rolled.
Figures all very rough and plenty of assumptions, but the long and short of it for me is that there was little incentive for Barclays to rush because the number of customers likely to jump ship is pretty minimal in comparison to their overall customer base. Plenty of other pressing things they should be tackling to retain customers, like their consistently lousy customer satisfaction ratings!
Obviously keen Apple Pay users will be over-represented on these forums, but I'm really struggling to believe that more than a few hundred customers, maybe low thousands, would go through the pain of switching accounts and changing bank cards just because Barclays delayed implementation of an embryonic payment system that doesn't do anything fundamentally new (i.e., it does exactly what contactless cards do, but in a more secure and possibly more convenient way).
(That said, once Apple Pay was announced they should have realised that bPay was dead in the water.)
This seems like it was written by Ashok from Dilbert rather than Ashok VP of Corporate and Personal Banking.
It is also clear that Barclays is trying to keep customers from fleeing due to the lack of Pay on offer.
I wonder if the stooge that sold the board on the idea that Barclays didn't need Pay got fired.