Barclays Planning to Launch Apple Pay Support in UK in Early 2016

Or to paraphrase... we managed to string you along by saying 'imminent launch' and hope we can keep that going indefinitely whilst we spam our sub-par bPay service adds at you.

When you look at how long the universe has been here, 4-8 months is imminent.

When you look at the lifespan of a May Fly...

Too late Barclays, I've already closed 2 accounts (had for 27 years), once my mortgage deal expires I'll be moving my joint acc and the mortgage to another provider (probably Santander as that's where I opened an account). Only 'issue' I have with Apple Pay is its too easy to spend!

Because someone decided to double-down on all the cash the had already sunk into the Barclays bPay system.

So now they have a clumsy uncompetitive homebrew payment system, no Apple Pay until half a year after their competitors, and are likely seeing a customer out flux.

I wonder if heads rolled.

I would be amazed if more than a handful of customers switch banks solely for reasons relating to Apple Pay.

Very, very rough calculation: about 15% of eligible Apple Pay users in the US had tried the service as of June. In the UK, the iPhone has about 36% market share. If you assume 36% of Barclays' 12 million current account holders have iPhones, that's about 4.3 million customers. If you assume that 15% of those customers will be interested in trying Apple Pay, that's about 648,000 customers. And that's a very generous estimate, given that the market share figure includes devices that can’t use Apple Pay and people who won’t have bank accounts, e.g. kids. Also, only about 23% of those who’ve tried it before in the US were using it again in June when given the opportunity. Apply that to the hypothetical interested Barclays customers and that’s 149,040 customers, or about 1.2% of their retail customers who might even think about moving because of Apple Pay.

Figures all very rough and plenty of assumptions, but the long and short of it for me is that there was little incentive for Barclays to rush because the number of customers likely to jump ship is pretty minimal in comparison to their overall customer base. Plenty of other pressing things they should be tackling to retain customers, like their consistently lousy customer satisfaction ratings!

Obviously keen Apple Pay users will be over-represented on these forums, but I'm really struggling to believe that more than a few hundred customers, maybe low thousands, would go through the pain of switching accounts and changing bank cards just because Barclays delayed implementation of an embryonic payment system that doesn't do anything fundamentally new (i.e., it does exactly what contactless cards do, but in a more secure and possibly more convenient way).

(That said, once Apple Pay was announced they should have realised that bPay was dead in the water.)

Slightly off topic, but how is apple pay working in the UK? I ask because I heard that although all machines are NFC, there may still be differences that would prevent Apple Pay from working on some (older) machines.

Here in the US it is slowly (painfully so) getting better as vendors turn on their machines or add them in their retail locations (and yet require signatures and sometimes even IDs-- SMH).

I bank with Barclays and my wife with TSB. Our joint account was with the Co-operative Bank. Since none of those were in Apple Pay to begin with, and we'd been pretty disappointed with Co-Op, we moved our joint account to Santander.

So, we've been using Apple Pay for about 6 weeks now with our Santander joint account.

It's been great. Every terminal which I used to use my contactless debit card with has worked fine with Apple Pay.

Even the coffee man and sandwich lady who come to our office in their vans every day have 3G handheld payment terminals which work great with Apple Pay. Since the phone immediately pops up with the amount paid, there's no need to hang around to wait for the receipt to print (you're not going to want to return a sandwich or a coffee anyway!). Just beep and go.

My local newsagent (literally two doors down the road from my house) also supports contactless and Apple Pay. In the mornings the small shop's full of kids and adults buying stuff for their journey to school or work. You can absolutely fly through with contactless or Apple Pay. I'm generally crap at making sure I've got cash, so it's great now that debit card payments are actually much quicker than cash!