Barclays Proposes Pingit Internationally
- Barclays is getting ready to propose its Android, iOS and BlackBerry OS m-payment app Pingit internationally. Launched beginning 2012 in the UK, this P2P payment solution relies on its customers’ mobile phone numbers for funds transfers. By the end of the year, more than ten African countries should be able to benefit from it too: first Kenya, and later on Botswana, South Arica, Zambia, Tanzania, Ghana, Egypt, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Seychelles and Mauritius. UK-based customers can already send money to Kenya using the app. This service is free and only wholesale currency exchange prices apply.
- The initially defined limits remain the same: UK customers can send up to 750 pounds and Kenyan users may receive up to 5,000 pounds a day. For now, only Barclays’s m-banking Hello Money service customers (about 120,000 people) will be able to use Pingit.
- In 2013, Pingit shall be proposed in other EU markets as well.
Source: Barclays press release
- Barclays, pioneered last February with this free nationwide P2P app, and now talks the lead through opening its service to other markets. According to the bank, the app has been downloaded over one million times throughout its first six months of availability in the UK.
- Barclays first targets the 200,000 Kenya-born UK-based users, and the Central Bank of Kenya reminds that there were about 600 million dollars in remittance payments made into the country from Kenyans working abroad globally to their home country during the first semester 2012.
- Barclays’s soon showed signs of opening and this strategy is again reasserted. Pingit was in fact made available to non-customers in April 2012 (see also May 2012 Insight) based on dedicated virtual accounts.