Apple Pay may launch for Barclays customers as soon as March
Barclays has been the lone holdout among United Kingdom banks as far as providing Apple Pay support to its customers. When the contactless payment method first arrived in the U.K., Barclays promised support for it. Unfortunately, the bank kept delaying the rollout. Recently, an email shared on Twitter has revealed that Apple Pay may arrive for Barclays’ customers as early as March.
Barclays Executive confirms #applepay launch date. At last! pic.twitter.com/5wuzMoGs4V
— Oli Foster-Burnell (@orfoster) January 25, 2016
The email comes from Ashok Vaswani, the CEO of Barclays Personal and Corporate Banking division. Promising support for Apple Pay within the next 60 to 75 days, it finally gives Barclays’ patrons a solid timeframe for when they can expect to start using their iOS or Apple Watch devices to make purchases at participating retailers and within apps. The email was only recently made public, but its date stamp of Jan. 12 would suggest a March timeframe for the Apple Pay rollout to Barclays’ customers.
It’s certainly within the realm of possibilities that Barclays could delay the launch again, but doing so after this email would be quite unwise. There’s already been a host of bad publicity for the bank, with some frustrated iPhone users threatening to switch financial institutions if Barclays doesn’t adopt Apple Pay sooner rather than later.
