Lloyds Bank is to work with mobile payments company Monitise to develop a suite of mobile card acceptance services for small businesses.
The services will be developed on Monitise's mPOS platform and aimed, in particular, at micro-merchants, start-ups and small business owners. The idea is to enable mobile businesses to be able to take payment more easily from customers in the field.
According to Lloyds, the number of small businesses in the UK has mushroomed, increasing every year for the past 12 years to 4.8 million by the beginning of 2012.
"There are more than 3.5 million sole traders in the UK who are missing out at the moment because they do not have access to existing mobile payments technology and we want to plug that gap with a service that is low cost and easy to use," said Aidene Walsh, managing director, cards, in the Transaction Banking division of Lloyds.
He continued: "We will offer the technology to sole traders and micro merchants and hope it will open up new trading opportunities for businesses up and down the country, reduce their costs and help drive growth for each and every one of our customers. This solution will also be the basis for a number of broader mobile banking initiatives which Lloyds is actively developing for our clients."
Lloyds is not the first bank in the UK to offer mobile payments. Santander recently announced a partnership with iZettle, which included an investment of €5m in the Swedish company. US online payments service Paypal has also said that it will be launching a mobile payments system in the UK this summer.
However, some doubts have been raised about the security of some mobile payments systems.
