Barclaycard's New Contactless Fashion Is Personalized Phone Case Pay

While Barclays was slow to warm to Apple Pay in the U.K., the bank's aggressive development of its own bPay contactless payments technology has continued unabated with deployments ranging from gloves to saddles.

Barclaycard's most recent enhancement is imbedding bPay into protective smartphone cases through a partnership with Case Station, which lets customers design their own cases for iPhone, Samsung and LG handsets.

"BPay is the ideal addition to the Case Station range as it instantly turns your phone into a way of making simple, flexible, and secure contactless payments for everyday purchases," Tami Hargreaves, commercial director for digital consumer payments at Barclaycard, said in a Sept. 15 press release.

The Case Station cases will hold the bPay contactless chip for users to make tap-and-go payments of £30 ($39 U.S.) or less without a PIN. Users can track spending through the Case Station on an iOS or Android app.

The bPay chip is linked to a secure digital wallet through a U.K.-registered Visa or MasterCard. Users add money to the chip through the mobile banking app or the bPay web portal.

In establishing a relationship with fashion brand TopShop in late 2015, Barclaycard established bPay technology as an option in various wearables. It was another step in expanding bPay for contactless payments in the U.K., where Barclaycard had previously established the payment chip inside of gloves, jackets and even the saddles at a donkey ride business a year earlier. 

As a major U.K. bank that did not support Apple Pay for nearly a year, Barclays finally made Apple's mobile payment system available to its customers in the U.K. in April.