Yesterday Barclaycard launched a new service in the UK called Bespoke Offers. The website will feature a range of deals from some of the UK’s largest retailers, including Tesco, British Airways, Virgin and Starbucks. Participating merchants will be able to target offers to consumers, who will be able to select the offers they like via the [...]

We are all familiar with the power of a good headline – it grabs our attention and compels us to read the rest of the story. In the world of printed newspapers, front-page headlines are there to sell papers. And it seems that ability to write a witty headline is a pre-requisite to getting a job at any [...]

Another day, another interesting development in the mobile payments space. It was announced today that the European Commission “unconditionally approved” “Project Oscar”, a joint initiative between the leading UK telco operators to bring mobile payments to the UK. Earlier this year, the EC decided to investigate the venture’s plans citing competitive concerns. It’s clearly a [...]

In the last few months the UK mobile payments scene has really come alive. Assuming I have the right combination of phone/ card/ MNO/ etc., as a consumer today I can already sign up to and start using: Quick Tap, an NFC payments solution from Barclaycard and Orange PayTag, a contactless sticker from Barclays PingIt, [...]

There were two interesting announcements this week heralding the dawn of the bank account-based P2P payment era in the UK. The first announcement came from Barclays about the launch of a Pingit service, which allows consumers to send and receive money using mobile phone numbers. Five days later, the UK Payments Council announced that it [...]