Barclays is launching its own contactless payments service for Android phones.
The bank, which made the decision not to support Google’s Android Pay service when it launches in the UK, decided instead to focus on developing its own platform.
Customers of the bank with an eligible NFC-enabled Android phone will soon be able to make payments of up to £30 by tapping their phone against a retailer terminal, without needing to open the app, enter a PIN, or verify with a fingerprint.
The platform will also support payments between £30 and £100, although this will require the entering of the card’s usual PIN, in between taps of the phone.
The bank has said that it is the first in the UK to offer its own, integrated service that will enable contactless payments for both debit and credit cards on Android phones.
Many of the other major financial institutions in the UK such as Lloyds Bank, HSBC, and Nationwide Building Society have all decided to support Android Pay, rather than launching their own platforms.
Barclays has clearly decided to go it alone in the Android space and while it has launched support for Apple Pay it won’t be offering support for Samsung Pay.
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Ashok Vaswani, CEO of Barclays UK, said: "Giving customers the choice about how to make everyday payments while making it really easy for people to use our services is why we’ve designed this new contactless payment functionality which will sit at the heart of our already popular mobile banking app.
"It’s all there, in one place, ready to go with no need to enter card details, delivering a brilliant experience in an instant."
This release will come as part of the Contactless Mobile project which the bank is pushing. The project, which will arrive in June, will integrate with the Barclays Mobile Banking app so that customers will be able to view their contactless mobile transactions alongside other account transactions.
Contactless Mobile will be rolled out over a number of days with customers being contacted by the bank when the service becomes available. The bank will be hoping that a number of its five million customers that already use its mobile banking app will be keen to use the Barclays developed contactless payment service for Android.
