Barclays ‘Confirms’ Apple Pay Support by April

By Michael Moore

Barclays customers’ long wait for Apple Pay support could be over by early April after an email claiming to be from the bank’s CEO suggested support will roll out by mid-April at the latest—nearly a year after the contactless payment system launched in the United Kingdom.

Ashok Vaswani told Oli Foster-Burnell that the service will go live “within the next 60 to 75 days,” meaning that support could launch sometime between March 26 and April 10, depending on its plans.

TechWeekEurope has contacted Barclays for confirmation, but the timeframe is consistent from previous promises to customers that Apple Pay support would arrive in “early 2016”.

At Last

The bank is one of a dwindling number in the United Kingdom not to offer support for Apple Pay, which launched in the U.K. back in July 2015.

Barclays initially appeared not to support the service, before later announcing support and promising a launch date that so far has not come.

The company had instead tried to pressure customers into using its own NFC service linked to their Barclaycard payment cards, with the Android version of the mybarclaycard app launching earlier this month, allowing allows those with Barclaycard credit cards to make NFC payments of up to £30.

Barclays had also been thought to be reluctant to push the use of Apple Pay to its customers due to its ongoing support for its own bPay mobile payment technology.

Following a number of trials, bPay finally went public across the United Kingdom last year with the launch of three new devices—a wristband, fob and sticker, which are now on sale to anyone with a registered Visa or MasterCard debit or credit card.