Mobile contactless payments are progressively becoming more and more mainstream as major manufacturers adopt systems that can be easily used via our smartphones. While LG Pay is yet to be seen in action, Google, Apple and even Samsung all have a technology – Android Pay, Apple Pay and Samsung Pay, respectively – that allows a user to complete transactions thanks to the NFC chips contained in most recent devices.
To this day, however, Apple Pay was the only service active in the United Kingdom, leaving a good number of consumers out of the industry, as more than half of the smartphones sold in the country run Android. According to a Telegraph report, however, sources close to the matter have confirmed that Android Pay should go live across Britain within the end of next month, approximately six months after the original US debut…
While the card issuers are not yet confirmed, the wide availability of contactless terminals in the UK should certainly be an incentive for major banks to take advantage of the service, whose Apple analogue has proven to be successful and constantly rising in use.
London’s local government body responsible for the majority of transport systems in the capital, ‘Transport for London’, recently showed that more than 35,000 journeys a day are payed for via mobile devices, a number that has risen seven-fold since the arrival of Apple Pay last fall.
Samsung Pay is set to launch in the UK during the year as well, effectively starting the competition for the contactless payments’ space. Analysts mentioned in the report claim that mobile payments ‘will increase more than 40-fold in the next two years’, as the ecosystem widens and strengthens not just in the capital but the country as a whole.
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