Fintechs have reportedly taken a toll on Barclays' Pingit initiative, a P2P and wearable payments brand that will be discontinued on June 30, nearly a decade after its launch in 2012.
The bank will transfer Pingit balances to linked Barclays accounts, and will refund the cost of the wearable hardware, according to Pingit's website.
Barclays did not return a request for comment by deadline, though U.K. media including Finextra and London News Time reported the bank was having a hard time keeping up with mobile wallets and third-party technology companies that infiltrated mobile payments in recent years. Barclays did not answer questions on future P2P or digital initiatives that would continue Pingit's services in another format.
Pingit is a combination of two initiatives at Barclays. The original Pingit launched as a P2P app and added other services such as retail payments and a deal with Verifone to merge e-commerce and point of sale transactions.
The bPay PayBand, a wearable payments device from Barclays. The bank rolled bPay into Pingit in 2019.
Bloomberg
Barclays added its bPay brand to Pingit in 2019 to consolidate the two apps. bPay included more forward-looking technology such as an array of wearables, which the bank used to gauge consumer interest in adopting different types of connected devices to make payments.
Most of these initiatives predate open banking, which makes it easier for consumers to link third-party financial services apps like mobile wallets to their bank.
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