Claims Club: Mobile phone payments key to improving satisfaction scores

That was the warning from Terence Trench, director and mobile solutions specialist at Barclays Bank, who outlined the rapid growth of contactless payments.

Speaking at Post's quarterly Claims Club event, he stated that 76,000 businesses now accept Pingit payments, there are three million registered users - equivalent to 7% of all smart phones - and that £1.8bn has been transferred through the system, including £1bn this year.

Trench also noted that 14 banks supports Paym, the industry-led collaboration that allows customers to securely send and receive money straight to their current accounts using just a mobile number, and that this has another three million users.

"Every six months we do the same amount of activity [with Pingit] that we did in the prior period from inception to date. Which in terms of Pingit is three years. So we did two and a half years worth of volume in the last six months. It is expedential growth," he added.

Travel insurance assistance specialist Cega became the first company to start using Pingit to pay claims last year and has so far processed 15 000 payments through the Pingit system, with two thirds of that volume coming in the last four months after it started incentivising policyholders to use it.

Neil Heasman, operations director at Cega, noted that at present customers get paid within two hours as it processes batch payments every 120 minutes. But that in the New Year it will be moving to a real time process. It will also be opening up to the other Paym users too.

"So that means that on the phone we will be able to do the full capture of the claim; running through the fraud and recovery bits and pieces and then if it stacks up under our criteria they will be paid right there and then," Heasman said.

"The insurance industry has been isolated from some of the [payment] developments that have happened in the last seven to ten years in terms of contactless, as well as e-commerce. But that is going to change," Trench concluded.

"What we have seen with Cega is that there are some genuinely innovative solutions that are going on, which could be a competitive advantage. So I implore you to go back to your treasury departments and challenge them about how they can use payments to provide a better service for customers."