Barclays lets slip that Apple Pay support is coming in March

We’ll probably never know for certain, but it seems likely that Barclays delayed support for Apple Pay so that it could push customers towards bPay, its own contactless payments solution.

Apple Pay launched in the U.K.in July 2015 at more than 250,000 locations across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and Barclays is perhaps the most notable holdout from the group of banks supporting the mobile payments service.

Barclays previously said it would support Apple Pay, but before now wouldn’t narrow down the time frame beyond early 2016. Moreover, the analyst says Apple Pay is “overwhelmingly the share leader” in POS mPayment transactions.

The email was only recently made public, but its date stamp of January 12 would suggest a March timeframe for the Apple Pay rollout to Barclays’ customers. There’s already been a host of bad publicity for the bank, with some frustrated iPhone users threatening to switch financial institutions if Barclays doesn’t adopt Apple Pay sooner rather than later. Its failure to deliver the service alongside the likes of Halifax, Natwest and HSBC has left some customers so irate that they have changed banks.

Now a customer by the name of Oli Foster-Burnell has posted an image of an email he received from Barclays CEO Ashok Vaswani confirming a late March launch.