Credit-card company Barclaycard is developing technology that will allow shoppers to charge in-store purchases to their mobile phones, according to The Telegraph.
Using a smartphone app, shoppers will be able to automatically charge items to a credit card when they scan them using the phone’s camera, without the need to take their purchases to a checkout.
The service is currently being trialled in the company’s Canary Wharf headquarters. According to The Telegraph, the company said that a high-street retailer is set to pilot the service next year.
Grab And Go
The Telegraph reports that Usman Sheikh, Barclaycard’s director of design and experimentation, said that the company was already speaking to a number of “significant household names”, including supermarkets, about the 'grab and go' technology.
“People want less and less friction when they’re shopping. […] The time involved is literally a fraction of what it would take to go to the till,” said Sheikh.
The announcement comes a few weeks after Amazon announced that it was bringing its own checkout-free grocery store to Europe.
© 2017 European Supermarket Magazine – your source for the latest retail news. Article by Aidan O’Sullivan. Click subscribe to sign up to ESM: The European Supermarket Magazine.
