Barclays opens Pingit to Indian remittances

Barclays is extending the reach of its Pingit mobile payments app by enabling Brits to send money to friends and family in India.

The app lets people in the UK to send payments to contacts in India using just the recipients' mobile phone numbers. Neither senders nor recipients need to be Barclays customers but there is a minimum transaction of £25 and a maximum of £1500, with payments taking up to 48 hours to go through.

There are 1.5 million British Indians and another one million Indian students and visitors in the UK. Barclays hopes that its new service will help it capture a significant slice of a UK-India remittance market worth over £2.5 billion

Ashok Vaswani, CEO, personal and corporate banking, Barclays, says: "Our goal is that no-one is left behind in the current digital revolution, and this launch demonstrates continued innovation by Barclays to meet the needs of UK consumers. It also marks an important step for future Pingit development and opportunities internationally."

Pingit has already been extended to Africa, with a link enabling people in the UK to send money to Kenya set up in 2012 and other countries added to the network soon after.

Barclays has also been experimenting with Pingit and commerce, yesterday outlining plans to team up with Blackhawk Network to provide a range of merchant gifting options to users of the app.

Related Companies

Barclays Bank

Channels

Retail banking Payments

Keywords

Mobile & online banking

Comments: (2)

A Finextra member 08 August, 2014, 09:07

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"this launch demonstrates continued innovation by Barclays to meet the needs of UK consumers" To be more specific .... the launch demostrates a niche product to meet the needs of UK consumers with Asian links. There's nothing truely innovative about this.

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A Finextra member 08 August, 2014, 10:14

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Banks have traditionally taken a back seat in the overseas remittance market, with a great number of forms making for a painful customer experience and high costs making it an area unattractive to many banks. As a consequence Money Transfer Agencies have cleaned up in this market, at the expense, some would say, of fairness. It's a field in which commercial pricing can become exploitative, much like the payday loans arena.

Thankfully the FCA has been alerted.

http://bit.ly/1kws4pp