New app 'Zapp' to allow customers to buy groceries, clothes and pay utility bills with their mobile phones

Sainsbury's is one of the supermarkets that will allow payment with mobile phones from next year. Credit: Clara Molden/PA Wire.

Major retailers including Asda, Sainsbury's and House of Fraser are going to allow customers to use mobile phones to pay at checkouts from next year.

Mobile payment innovation Zapp, which has been developed by the company behind Link cash machines, has unveiled a string of firms where customers will be able to use the new technology, which also include:

  • Spar

  • Clarks

  • Dune

  • Best Western

  • Siemens

  • Thomas Cook

  • Bravissimo

  • Shop Direct - the group behind Littlewoods, very.co.uk, Woolworths.co.uk and Isme

Customers may soon be able to pay with their phones. Credit: DPA DEUTSCHE PRESS-AGENTUR/DPA/Press Association Images

The firms which have agreed to support Zapp so far have a base of more than 35 million customers between them.

People will also be able to use Zapp to pay household bills, with

  • Anglian Water

  • Bristol and Wessex Water

  • Sutton and East Surrey Water

Zapp is currently working to pilot the technology, which will then be launched in the first half of 2015.

How it would work

A typical scenario involving Zapp could mean that the customer would take their goods to the checkout as they normally would and they would then opt to pay by Zapp, which could be by telling the cashier at the till or by pressing a button on a self-service checkout.The customer would then log into the banking app on their phone and select which account they want to pay from. A six-digit code, representing the shopping basket would appear on the phone, which would then be tapped in at the retailer's point of sale. When the payment is made, the money will move out of the customer's account in "real time".For low-value payments, it may be possible to simply pay by waving the phone over a reader without the need to get authentication via the banking app, in a similar way to using a contactless card to make a small payment without needing to enter your Pin number.