Barclays PingIt finally changes the mobile payment landscape – without NFC

At last it’s here: Jem Finer’s sinfonia for mobile phones… Only joking. At last what we finally have this week is secure, bank backed, peer-to-peer mobile payments thanks to Barclays Pingit app, which went live yesterday in the UK.

While Finer’s – from one my favourite bands, The Pogues – art work, which creates a random Sinfonia as participating phones ringtones are recorded and their location plotted to create a sound map is pretty darn cool (and its so nice to see a man usually found plucking a mandola creating music with phones) the Barclays PingIt launch trumps it. It heralds the arrival of mainstream mobile payments and will, if it takes hold, usher in consumer buy-in with mobile payments.

The details of how it works are here, but basically the app-based service allows you to link your phone number to your bank account so that anyone else with the same can move money from their account to yours by simply sending it to your phone number within the app.

Its so simple and so perfect I have been pretty much jumping up and down with delight ever since I saw it. Of course, the mainstream media has been banging on about how secure it may or may not be, how consumers won’t trust it and whether we really need this, but I know that this is the big breakthrough mobile payments needs.

Finally someone has come up with a simple way of sending money to one another via phones. Doing it between people and merchants can only be a few months away.

This will totally change the mobile commerce and retailing landscapes – and there is not a drop of investment in NFC to be seen. Yet. This kind of tool will revolutionise how consumers view mobile payments – and will slowly teach them to trust it. It will also revolutionise how small merchants such as plumbers and builders start to collect money without having to use cash or cheques. Retailers will soon be also accepting payments this way to. Check outs could soon look very different: you will be able to pay where you stand.

Sure there are some security concerns, but there are with all payment channels. Fraudsters will find ways to exploit it, but it was ever thus and is unlikely, I believe, to destroy the fundamental joy of being able to simply pay using your mobile.

So, while it is pretty much bash a banker season – and I am not immune to knocking the greedy bastards – but Barclays should be clapped firmly on the back for making this happen. Watch as the rest join in. So Moody’s, put THAT in your pipe and quantitatively easy it!