Pay Friends And Stay Friends: NatWest’s IOU Site

Asking a friend to pay you back is never a comfortable situation, but if you don’t speak up you may lose out. NatWest has come to the rescue with a new IOU microsite featured on its online and mobile banking app that will help you issue a friendly reminder: friends who pay, are friends who stay.

The IOU site sends out personalized IOU reminders to friends who owe you money. NatWest created the site to help promote its recently launched NatWest mobile banking app, reports Finextra.

The mobile app includes a “Pay Your Contacts” feature, which allows users to pay anyone with a Visa debit, credit or prepaid account card to transfer money via mobile phones. Customers are allowed to send a maximum of £250 per day, and will receive confirmations through text message.

In an effort to expand the mobile payment scheme, NatWest has introduced a cheeky team of IOU characters to relay payment messages to friends.

When logged onto the site, customers can choose from a team of quirky charters, including a motivational speaker, hippies, a paranoid psychic, a royal mounted policeman, an IOU superhero, hipster girl or a reverse psychologist. After choosing a character, the site prompts the user to fill in your name, the friend’s name and the amount of money they owe (with a £250 limit.)

A personalized video—which lasts just under two minutes—is sent to the friend of choice, and hopefully the recipient responds to your message. The person will ideally use the “Pay Your Contacts” feature to reimburse you, and after 1-2 business days the money will be automatically transferred into your account.

The British market has been generally slow to adopt mobile payment and mobile banking applications, but as both trends continue to grow, UK banks like NatWest have been working quickly to catch up.

NatWest’s mobile app was launched earlier this year, and despite a couple glitches in the first months of service, they’ve continued to heavily promote the new app to consumers.

So, to those of you reluctant to badger friends about unpaid IOU’s, it may be worth your while to give NatWest’s new personalized IOU site a try.

In the words of the NatWest hippies: “if your friend doesn’t pay you back, man, that’s just not cool.”

To read the full story at Finextra click here.