Verifone has entered an agreement to use Barclays' Pingit mobile payment app as part of Verifone's PAYware Ocius mobile gateway. Initially, this deal will support only e-commerce sites but Barclays said the pair may bring the technology to the physical point of sale in a later phase.
The complexities involved in linking Pingit to brick-and-mortar are too daunting to make it the first step, said Tim Sloane, the vice president for payments innovation at the Mercator Advisory Group.
"If this actually works and drives some volume, (physical) is an obvious place to but it's a lot harder. It requires a lot more mechanics at the backend to connect POS to the Pingit infrastructure," Sloane said. "They probably would have liked to have gone physical first. But when considering an alternative payments network, there's a lot to think about. Not just for the technology, but from the regulatory perspective."
Barclays said that Verifone has 20,000 managed service clients in the U.K. and that Pingit has 70,000 business users. The bank said that Pingit's more than 2.7 million registered users have transferred more than £1.6 billion through its system.
Ashok Vaswani, CEO of Barclays Personal and Corporate Banking, issued a statement saying the move could help some consumers get over current mobile payment hurdles.
"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," Vaswani said. "Mobile brings so many advantages to consumers and through this partnership with Verifone we can make the mobile checkout completely frictionless."
