Mumbai: To tap into growing remittances between England and India, British lender Barclays has launched a special mobile payment service between the two nations, which allows even non-Barclays customers to transfer money with ease.
For Britain, India is the single largest remittances market, with the volume crossing 2.5 billion pounds in 2013, which is around 7 per cent of the total forex remittances that India received in the year.
Named Barclays Pingit, this mobile payments service allows users in Britain to send quick and easy payments using just a mobile number to anyone in India—the largest recipient of remittances in the world for many years now. “This is a first as neither the sender nor the recipient needs to be a Barclays customer,” said Barclays chief executive for personal and corporate banking Ashok Vaswani.
There are over 1.5 million Indians or persons of Indian origin in the island nation, which also gets over 1 million Indian students and visitors per annum. There is a minimum transaction of 25 pounds and a maximum of 1,500 pounds and payments can take up to 48 hours, the bank said.
