In an emailed statement sent to Barclays customer Oli Foster-Burnell on January 12th, Vaswani said the service will go live "within the next 60 to 75 days." Depending on the company's plans, card support could be enabled between March 12th and March 27th. That's stretching the "early 2016" launch touted last year, but it may be enough to stop some disappointed Barclays customers from switching to another bank.

The reasons behind Barclays' decision to delay its Apple Pay rollout haven't been made clear, but the bank has been working on a few contactless payment services of its own. There's bPay, which relaunched in June 2015, upcoming products from its partnership with mobile payment provider Zapp and, of course, its own NFC payment service that was just made available to Barclaycard customers.

This article has been updated to clarify the launch date. It is now based on the date the original email was received (January 12th).