Barclays and Verifone have struck a deal that will see Barclays’ Pingit mobile payment system accepted as a payment method for retailers using Verifone’s mCommerce online gateway. The agreement means that Verifone’s 20,000 managed service clients in the UK will have the option of offering Pingit as a payment solution to their customers.

Around 70,000 UK businesses currently support Pingit, which has over 2.7m registered users, and has seen £1.6bn transferred using the platform. The Pingit app is available on Apple, Android, Windows and Blackberry devices. Customers don’t have to bank with Barclays to use the Pingit app.

Research from Judo Payments found that roughly a quarter of consumers who tried to buy products on their phones have had transactions fail, while another study from Jumion found that 55 per cent of UK smartphone owners admit to abandoning a mobile transaction, with slow loading times, the payment process being overly complicated and difficulty navigating the checkout cited as the most common reasons for abandoning the purchase. The companies said their partnership will tackle these problems head on.

Verifone will integrate the Pingit service into its PAYware Ocius mCommerce gateway, making it available to any online merchant or retailer. Going forward, Verifone and Barclays said they will look at broadening the acceptance of Pingit via Verifone at physical retail and POS payment terminals.

“We want to end the frustration caused by mobile checkout failure because it’s just too cumbersome to laboriously enter long card numbers, and Verifone is ideally positioned to help us achieve this goal,” said Ashok Vaswani, CEO of Barclays Personal and Corporate Banking. “By using Pingit on mobile checkout pages we can give greater confidence to customers and retailers alike. Through this partnership with Verifone we can make the mobile checkout completely frictionless.”