Barclays is known for championing new technology iStock Circle, the leading digital payments company which uses the blockchain as a settlement rail, is launching a social payment app in the UK with the help of Barclays.
It’s the first time the Financial Conduct Authority has granted an E-Money Issuer license to a consumer Internet firm for cross-border payments with blockchain technology.
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Circle said the app, which will be available on iOS and Android, will allow UK consumers to send and receive cross border payments with instant conversion between pound sterling and US dollars with zero fees, and that euro and other currencies will follow.
Circle formed a strategic commercial partnership with Barclays to launch in the UK but stressed, the bank is not distributing the product or making it available to Barclays customers; rather it is providing Circle with underlying capabilities to hold sterling for its own consumers via any bank account in the UK.
Circle has always held the belief that transferring money using the open internet as a payment rail should be as easy as sending email or other web content. The company is focused on social payments – exchanges of money between friends and family which has exploded in China, where some 500 million users do payments using apps like Alipay and WeChat.
It should be said, Circle and some other well-known companies doing transactions in bitcoin and providing wallets, have received a bit of stick about pivoting away from the iconic cryptocurrency.
Sean Neville, co-founder of Circle told IBTimes: "When Jeremy and I founded the company we were very excited about bitcoin because it enabled us to deliver the product that we wanted to deliver to everyone. We always intended it to be in the background."We didn’t think it was necessarily something that most people would […]
