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Barclays finally rolls out Apple Pay support

It's taken nine months, but the last of UK's big banks is on board.

If you're a Barclays customer and you've been waiting since last year for the bank to support Apple Pay, we have some good news. The company announced today that the NFC payment technology has been enabled on Barclays and Barclaycard accounts, allowing customers to pay using their iPhone, Apple Watch and iPad at more than 400,000 contactless points around the UK.

If you're new to Apple Pay, adding your Barclays card is simple. Open Settings on your iPhone and then select Wallet & Apple Pay. Once there, you will likely be asked to enter your iCloud password and can then begin the process of either confirming your existing Apple account details or adding the necessary information. In our test, the bank required a text message to confirm the card but the whole process took less than a couple of minutes.

Although Barclays CEO Ashok Vaswani has commented on the launch, noting that the bank is "passionate about helping customers access services and carry out their day to day transactions in the way that suits them," there is no word on why it took the bank so long to support the technology. After all, it did say it would roll it out by March 27th at the latest, but missed its own deadline. With Barclays now on board, all of the major UK banks now support Apple Pay, but support will not be so unanimous for Google's own payment system, which will hit Britain in the coming months.