Barclays offers 1st international mobile phone transfers

Rating: Starts off with UK to Kenya free money transfers

The mobile payments sector is hotting up very fast indeed. But Barclays Bank appears to have a strong grasp of what the market wants. That’s the opposite to industry pundits who predict m-payments will only happen if everyone has an NFC enabled handset. What Barclays has done is launch the first international free mobile payments service offered by a bank. As from today [20th August 2012], Barclays customers in the UK will be able to send money to Kenya using the bank’s Barclays Pingit mobile app. The intention isroll this service out internationally, across thirteen African countries by Q1 2013 with expansion into Europe during Q1-Q2 2013. This is no half-baked offering – customers in Kenya will be able to receive up to £5,000 per day.Those Brits in the UK already using shouldn’t get too excited because Pingit limits still remain the same whereby UK customers can send up to £750 per day.

Now Barclays describes its new international money transfer scheme as ‘free’. This does genuinely seem to be the case.

However, customers will only incur the wholesale costs of foreign currency exchange.

So the rate you get might be a bit naff but Barclays will charge no commission for the actual international money transfer.

That’s pretty impressive and the good news given that there are over 200,000 people living in the UK who were born in Kenya (Source: ONS, 2009) and many more with Kenyan heritage or who have a family or business connection to the country.

At the other end, there are around 120,000 Barclays Hello Money customers in Kenya who are now able to receive money.

The Barclays Pingit mobile banking app is doing quite well in the UK having achieved 529,000 downloads in its first month after launch.

In the first six months Pingit has already achieved over one million downloads.

The Barclays Pingit app works with Android 2.2 and above, iOS 4.2 and above, Blackberry OS 5.0 and above.

Users must download and register via the app to be able to send payments. Alternative registration is via the standard Barclays website here.

Barclays plans to make the service available for our customers in Botswana, South Africa, Zambia, Tanzania, Ghana, Nigeria, Egypt, Zimbabwe, Uganda, UAE, Seychelles and Mauritius by Q1 2013.

Pingit’s news comes hot on the heels of a US announcement of a major m-commerce initiative last week called Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX). More details here.