My new Barclays bpay wristband arrived a week ago. It is my second one and they made us first wave adopter wait for almost a month after our old one expired. Little birds in Barclays told me the product almost got cancelled and they delayed the production of the second wave devices, believing that wearables and phone payment apps will make these useless.
And throughout the week I have been seeing ads for the bpay lineup on the tube:
I didn’t give much thought to it until one of my friends got the sticker version and stuck it in the back of her new iPhone. Her boyfriend started saying that she should not have done that, because the extra RFID chip will interfere with the NFC function of the phone. And that seemed so true. Why have they not warned consumers about this?
Surprise Surprise
By 2015, half of the phones in the world will still not have NFC built in, according to Frost & Sullivan. This means a standalone RFID payment device still has its market value in the next few years.
TfL has just started accepting Apple Pay this week though, which means that her bpay sticker on her iPhone 6 is unfortunately, a true redundancy.
NFC Positioning on Phones
If you stick your bpay sticker on the very bottom part of your iPhone, there is a chance that you will be able to use the sticker without clashing even if the NFC chip is turned on. You have to be very careful though with the positioning.
*the chip highlighted in the purple box is the NFC chip on the iPhone*
It is also worth mentioning that British carrier EE has started issuing SIM cards with RFID wallet chips just like that built in, making the increasingly obsolete SIM card that much more useful for the smart phone without NFC: link
underbus 
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