Barclays Pingit and Verifone collaborate to offer consumers quick and easy mobile commerce solution

Customers and retailers will no longer experience the frustration of failed mobile commerce transactions thanks to a new partnership between Barclays and Verifone.

The two organisations today announce an agreement to integrate Pingit as an accepted payment method for retailers using Verifone’s m-commerce gateway.

This agreement means Verifone’s 20,000 managed service clients in the UK will have the opportunity to join the 70,000 businesses already using Pingit to provide an easy payment solution that will eliminate the exasperating multi-stage checkout process that can infuriate even the most patient shopper.

Research has shown that around a quarter of consumers who tried to buy products on their phones have had transactions fail[1] and 55% of UK smartphone owners admit to abandoning a mobile transaction, with slow loading times, the payment process being too complicated and difficulty navigating checkout cited as the most common reasons for abandoning the purchase.[2]

This agreement is designed to tackle those challenges head on. It will allow the public to pay easily and conveniently on a tablet or smartphone using their Pingit app without having to key-in information such as payment card details or a shipping address into the retailer’s m-commerce website. Payments to retailers are instantaneous and the customer doesn’t have to bank with Barclays to use the Pingit app.

Verifone will integrate the Pingit service into its PAYware Ocius m-commerce gateway – making it available to any online merchant or retailer and in the future, Verifone and Barclays will look at broadening the acceptance of Pingit via Verifone at physical retail and POS payment terminals.

June Felix, President, Verifone Europe, said: “This is an important partnership as we continue to broaden the range of services and value we bring to our merchant clients, simplifying all forms of payments, across all sales channels, for millions of consumers.”

Ashok Vaswani, CEO of Barclays Personal and Corporate Banking, said: “We want to end the frustration caused by mobile checkout failure because it’s just too cumbersome to laboriously enter long card numbers, and Verifone is ideally positioned to help us achieve this goal. By using Pingit on mobile checkout pages we can give greater confidence to customers and retailers alike. Mobile brings so many advantages to consumers and through this partnership with Verifone we can make the mobile checkout completely frictionless.”

More than £1.6 billion has been transferred using Pingit to date, which currently has over 2.7 million registered individual users, with more than 70,000 businesses accepting payments via the app. It is available to download for free on Apple, Android, Windows and Blackberry devices.