U.K. bank Barclays has confirmed it will be launching support for Apple Pay sometime in the next 45 to 60 days. The estimate was shared via an email to a Barclays customer, sent on January 12.
The launch date was provided by Barclays CEO of Personal and Corporate Banking Ashok Vaswani in what appears to be a legitimate email sent to customer Oli Foster-Burnell, and later reported by Engadget. We can verify the executive has emailed customers about Apple Pay in the past.
Barclays has been the last remaining Apple Pay holdout among the “big-four” banks in the United Kingdom. Participating banks in the U.K. include: The the Bank of Scotland, First Direct, Halifax, HSBC, Lloyds Bank, M&S Bank, MBNA, Nationwide, NatWest, Royal Bank of Scotland, Santander, Tesco Bank, TSB and Ulster Bank.
Apple launched its touchless mobile payments service in the U.K. in July 2015, at more than 250,000 locations. Most of the U.K.’s biggest banks signed on with the first two months. In the face of a large outcry from its iPhone-using customers, Barclay announced it would support the new service, but gave only a vague “early in the new year” timeframe for flipping the switch.
