Streamlining Mobile Banking: Barclays to Integrate its BPay, Pingit Products

Friday, March 29th, 2019

Streamlining Mobile Banking: Barclays to Integrate its BPay, Pingit Products

Barclays is preparing to merge its wearable mobile payments product BPay with its more popular Pingit app, after a long struggle to attract more users. The bank intends to increase adoption of the latter by complementing it with the already booming former.

Currently, the products require that users download and maintain the two apps as separate— one for Pingit, which supports peer-to-peer transactions and international money transfers, and another for BPay, which lets people top up prepaid credit onto wearable accessories for making contactless payments.

It should be recalled that BPay released its hand-wearable band (or key fob) back in 2014, way ahead of U.K.’s launch of Apple Pay. And though Pingit has performed remarkably well to attract and retain over 3.6 million users, BPay has only managed to get the attention of tens of thousands of users, according to a Barclays spokesperson.

This integration comes at a time when retail banks are trying to adapt to the customers’ changing needs—most of them now want to manage their finances on smartphones.

Commenting on the matter back in October 2019, Barclays’ Chief Executive Jes Staley stated that the industry should defend its advantage over less regulated tech companies like Amazon and Apple referring to payments as “the battleground of finance for the coming 15 years.”

As a result, device-makers are also shifting focus to the same trend. According to Bloomberg’s May 2019 reports, Apple and Goldman Sachs were working on designing a co-branded credit card in a move intended to push the investment bank deeper into the world of consumer finance, and let the tech giant play a critical role in streamlining how its consumers manage their funds.

In the meantime, counterpart banks like the popular U.K.’s Monzo are also changing the face of Britain’s consumer-banking space. Monzo is pacing the shift to mobile banking by designing digital-only products present solely on smartphones.

Barclays Bank also joined forces with several watch brands as a way to capture the expanding market of wearable gadgets. Among the big names it partnered with include; Timex and Guess. According to a statement, BPay users, as well as those with partner products that feature an embedded BPay chip, will be made compatible with the Pingit app.

Closing Thoughts

Barclays strategy to merge the hand wearable to the Pingit App will ease the consumer-banking process for users and capture the attention of more and more customers as many seek to find easy mobile banking solutions.