BPay Announced Changes

Apr 1, 2015
Posted by: David

Anyone who is a BPay user, and even a self-acknowledged fan must be intrigued, excited and nervous about the recent email from Barclays. They have advised us that after getting us users all excited and using our BPay band that they will be moving “your bPay band's expiry date forward from 30 June to 31 May this year.”

So that is the bad news, they have told us in the same email that they have “some exciting plans for the year ahead”. Having been lucky enough to Chair Michael Saunders, Managing Director Barclaycard Digital Consumer Payment at the MEPS event in Berlin I know that part of this new exciting news will include more wearable and linked tokens such as key fobs. The ability to link multiple token devices to a single account an even to have multiple users on a single account. As his slide presented showed:

Of course the real challenge will be how they ensure a smooth move from the current product to the new one, how they manage the residue balances at expiry and how they ensure an easy sign up and receive process.

I wrote in my blog last October (http://www.polymathconsulting.com/blog/42/101/Barclays-BPay-A-Giant-Leap-forward-or-a-Small-Step ) about how whilst the technology in itself it could be argued was not the first or a giant step forward it was the first time major UK bank had moved into wearables. The Barclays current product is on MasterCard, Caixa Bank in Spain have also launched a very similar product, some might say with an even nice wristband, using the same Gemalto chip, on Visa: http://press.lacaixa.es/caixabank/press-releases/caixabank-launches-the-first-visa-contactless-wristband-supporting-payments-with-a-simple-tap-of-the-wrist__1775-c-20401__.html

So we now wait to see what Barclays had in store for BPay, keep following my Blogs and I will update you once live with a customer journey and experience.