Barclays Will Let Businesses Send You Money Using Just A Phone Number

Barclays has signed a deal with American firm Bottomline Technologies that will allow companies to send money to customers just with a phone number.

The move will expand Barclay’s existing use of the Pingit service, which lets users send money to other registered accounts with just the phone number that is linked to it.

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Exact details of the deal are still scarce, although any companies and consumers looking to use the service will need to be registered either with Pingit or Paym, which is a similar service run by several of the UK’s biggest high street banks and building societies.

The two services have an approximate combined total of five million accounts in the UK.

Richard Ransom, product marketing manager, Bottomline Technologies, said that the company expects its service to appeal to a very wide-range of businesses.

“This fully automated solution can be especially attractive to businesses such as those in the utility and insurance sectors that still rely on high volumes of costly cheque generation,” he said.

“As well as offering a lower-cost alternative to existing payment processes, the convenience and immediacy of Pingit and Paym can significantly improve customer engagement and satisfaction levels for users. For example, in the case of Pingit, all recipients will be notified of their payment via an SMS or app alert.”

The deal could indicate the next step for Barclays’ PingIt for corporates service, which was first revealed a year ago, but had seen poor pick up due to the need for businesses to implement the service within their payment systems, which was often a lengthy and costly process.

However this new Bottomline partnership will allow for Pingit and Paym transactions to be easily set up on a company’s existing payments infrastructure.

Barclays already has a number of corporate customers on its books for Pingit, including Northern Gas Networks, which it uses to pay customers who have been without gas for more than 24 hours. It says that the new service will allow it to cut out the middle man needed to obtain a customer’s bank details first before authorising the payment.

Barclays first launched Pingit in 2012, allowing customers a quick and secure way to send and receive money. The app has since been downloaded over 4.2 million times, with its users, which include over 67,000 businesses, sending over £1.2 billion using the service.

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