About
Grab+Go is a new payment concept that transforms a shoppers’ smartphone into a ‘pocket checkout’, allowing them to simply scan the items they want to buy as they pick them and then complete their purchase with a single click and walk out of a store.
Innovation presentation
The way we purchase and pay for goods and services is evolving at a rapid pace, and as the UK’s leading payments business, with relationships on both sides of the counter, Barclaycard sits at the forefront of coming up with new ways of making purchasing and paying easier for both consumers and merchants.
One of the pain points of purchasing that consumers constantly cite is the need to queue to make a payment for something; they increasingly want speed and convenience when shopping.
Tackling this problem, Barclaycard has created ‘Grab+Go’ – a brand new way of streamlining the purchase journey for retail goods and services that removes the need for consumers to queue at a till point to pay, by instead allowing them to use their mobile phone as a ‘pocket checkout’.
Centered around a proprietary app, it allows shoppers to simply scan the items they want to buy as they select them, click checkout when they’re done and walk out the store without visiting a till point. Payment is taken seamlessly and invisibly in the background using pre-loaded card details.
Developed in-house at Barclaycard and currently being testing internally with colleagues in staff canteens at five sites in the UK and US, Grab+Go allows retailers of all sizes to offer an alternative form of payment and purchasing to their customers.
Uniqueness of the project
Barclaycard has been at the heart of payments in the UK for more than 50 years. Since introducing the country’s first credit card we have played a role in every major payment milestone since.
The way in which people shop and pay has evolved significantly over the past decade, and as the use of mobile and wearable payments grows, so too does the use of ‘Invisible Payments’. This is whereby the act of making a formal payment is removed from the purchase journey, and which is becoming increasingly commonplace in many of the mobile apps we buy goods and services through these days, including Uber, Deliveroo, Amazon’s 1-Click ordering service.
Instead of entering our payment details every time we make a payment, they are instead stored in an app or online interface, with the authorisation for the merchant to process payments incorporated into the purchase journey, seamlessly and invisibly.
Grab+Go is the first use of this way of purchasing in the physical retail environment – combining it this with the ability for the user to scan and ‘checkout’ their own shopping, it brings another brand new way of paying (and) shopping to the UK.
