Mobile Payments Means Major Tech Battle Between Britain’s Biggest Banks

With mobile payments on the rise in general, it means a certain amount of competition among platforms, and it also means some changes that are less than universally loved.

While some believe that banks are in a hurry to close branches, fire employees, and get everyone onto mobile as rapidly as possible—regardless of the human cost in any of a host of ways—the banks stick by one central claim: this is what a majority of customers want.

As such, banks are rolling out many new options, and waging a kind of technological war to help fend off the competition. This much is clear in considering two of Great Britain’s biggest banks: Barclays and Santander.

Santander, for example, has started offering cloud data storage services for corporate clients. It’s put a hefty sum—230 million pounds sterling, at last report—into a major new data center to not only store its own data but also to lease out some storage to clients. That suggests some important new data protection features afoot, especially given the recent attack on JPMorgan; no one wants to be on the receiving end of an attack like that again, so as a result, improved security may be in the works.

Meanwhile Barclays, not to be outdone, has launched a breed of biometric scanners for business customers.

Barclays retail customers will need to only place a finger on a scanner connected to a computer to access an account. Given the nature of the technology, it’s not out of line to think it would make its way to mobile as well.

What’s more, reports suggest that Barclays is working on a variety of new technologies, ranging from the bPay wristband from last year to, more recently, gloves devoted to mobile payments.

Both Santander and Barclays, at last report, back the Paym service, which has around 1.6 million customers so far, and allows users to send and receive payments directly using a mobile number. Both have also brought videoconferencing tools into the equation, allowing customers to reach a call center by a Skype-style interface once an app is downloaded and a few simple questions establish a user’s identity.

So while it seems that Barclays is putting up more of a technological front, Santander is working to establish itself as the safer option.

Each approach has its pros and cons, of course, but from the look of it, the two are setting things up nicely to run the market between them. Naturally, it won’t be as easy as all that; there are simply too many competitors in the field to really have that kind of clear two-sided impact. But it’s clear all the same that the battle of the High Street titans is really only just the start of a much larger bout between them and the rest of the world.