As we reported at the start of April, HSBC had been a little slow to bring out banking apps for smartphones, but their Fast Balance app for the iPhone finally got them started, although with a limited amount of functionality.

They’ve now added the Fast Balance Android app, which can be downloaded for free from Google Play. The app is compatible with Android 2.2 and above.

Here’s what you can do with the app:

• Check your balance
• View your six latest transactions
• Top-up your mobile phone

Screenshots

The loading screen:

Your options:

Your latest account balance:

Your most recent transactions:

HSBC Fast Balance App For Android was originally published at Money Watch a UK personal finance blog. Sign up to our RSS feed and follow us on Twitter.

The app, PayPal inStore, is a separate app to the normal PayPal app, and currently works in Oasis, Karen Millen, Coast and Warehouse. You’ll need to download the app for either iPhone or Android phones, and have a PayPal account with a debit or credit card attached to the account.

You get a unique, one-time barcode each time you want to make a payment. The cashier will simply scan the barcode or type in the unique 10-digit code. Your PayPal account will then be charged and you’ll receive an instant electronic receipt.

Vouchers & Promotions

Any special PayPal inStore app vouchers or promotions that you’ve opted in to will be automatically applied to your purchase. You’ll also receive alerts on your mobile when new promotions are starting. If you accept them, a reminder will be added to your calendar to help make sure you don’t miss out.

Refunds

Bought a product with PayPal online but need to return it? If the retailer accepts PayPal inStore then there’s no need to send it back, now you can just take it to their nearest shop for an exchange or refund.

Will PayPal inStore take off? Well, as it’s only currently available in 4 chain stores, PayPal themselves possibly aren’t completely convinced, but it does haven a couple of positives. Firstly, there is no NFC technology involved, which means that a wide range of phones should be able to handle these payments without any added technology. This could also be a selling point to future retailers, as it means there isn’t a need to install NFC readers at their tills (although there may be other hardware/software upgrades required to accomodate PayPal inStore’s barcodes).

Also, there is no need for there to be a wireless or mobile network signal available when making a payment. The app will store the details and queue them for when there is a network signal.

Here’s PayPal’s video of the app in action:

Screenshots

Here are a few screenshots from the iPhone version of the PayPal inStore app.

The home screen, showing your options:

The barcode needed to make your payment:

Need to get a refund? You can do that on the app too:

The app is secured with a PIN:

PayPal inStore: PayPal Comes To The High Street was originally published at Money Watch a UK personal finance blog. Sign up to our RSS feed and follow us on Twitter.

You can see how Rory got on in the video below:

For those who can’t be bothered to watch the video, the answer is he struggled. Few retailers offered to take mobile payments, and the systems were confusing and misunderstood. Although if he’d have gone to a Greggs or McDonalds rather than fancy coffee shops then he might have found it easier.

Can You Live With Mobile Money Alone? was originally published at Money Watch a UK personal finance blog. Sign up to our RSS feed and follow us on Twitter.

The phishing scam’s aim is to collect sensitive authentication data to people’s credit card or bank accounts. It usually includes an attached form and advises the recipient that he is owed a tax rebate of £209.87. Once the form has been completed, cyber criminals have access to the vital banking and personal information required for identity fraud or the fraudulent access and emptying of victims’ bank accounts.

This type of tax refund phishing scam was first detected in 2009. It has since undergone several developments in order to maximise its success rate targeted at those expecting to receive tax rebates in 2012. The attached form that accompanies the scam no longer opens using the cyber criminals’ registered domains, but now downloads onto the user’s PC and opens through their local browser. This bypasses the anti-phishing module in local security solutions, allowing it to execute. Bitdefender believes the form is then sent to a domain registered in New Zealand.

“With over three million UK citizens expected to start receiving tax refund payouts from now until October, there is clearly a large audience which could be duped by this convincing phishing scam,” said Catalin Cosoi, Chief Security Researcher at Bitdefender. “The scam is more intelligent than ever before and capable of bypassing many traditional antivirus systems. We advise the public to disregard emails claiming to offer a tax rebate and ensure they have an effective security solution in place.”

The official HMRC site states that it is their policy to “NEVER send notification of a tax rebate by email, or ask you to disclose personal or payment information by email.” Some of the most common examples of fake email addresses / email content or attachments used in tax rebate phishing scams are available to view here.

Beware Of Emails From HMRC Promising Tax Rebates was originally published at Money Watch a UK personal finance blog. Sign up to our RSS feed and follow us on Twitter.

To participate in iZettle’s beta programme simply download the app from the Apple App Store and request an invitation or sign-up via iZettle’s UK website. iZettle is looking for a wide spread of users to ensure it tests the service with all kinds of businesses and individuals using it for different purposes. It has 3000 mini chip-card readers to give away.

If you are one of the lucky users chosen to be a part of the programme you will receive an invitation by email and a free card reader will be sent to you in the post.

“I know what it is like to start your own business – you need all the help you can get and iZettle is one of those small but important elements that can define the difference between failure and success,” said Charles Dunstone, The Carphone Warehouse founder and iZettle investor. “Taking payments is becoming increasingly difficult with people carrying less and less cash in their wallets. With iZettle – problem solved – you can focus on growing your business.”

iZettle lets anyone take credit or debit card payments anytime, anywhere.  It’s simple to set up and use, and makes it easy to share purchases with Facebook friends.

Unlike costly traditional point of sale card readers, with iZettle there is no set up fee, or monthly fee or minimum. Instead, iZettle owners pay only a percent of the sale. iZettle then electronically deposits the balance of each payment in the seller’s bank account.

iZettle is EMV (Europay, MasterCard and Visa) approved, and compliant with PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard). No sensitive data is ever stored on the mobile device or iZettle reader, and all data traffic is encrypted.

Jacob de Geer, Founder and CEO at iZettle comments: “The U.K. is a priority market for us and we are very excited about kick-starting this beta programme with three of the major card networks; MasterCard, American Express and Diners Club.”

Marion King, President of MasterCard UK & Ireland, said: “MasterCard is working with partners across the industry to drive the development of smart, simple and safe payments and make our vision of a world beyond cash into a reality. We’ve been supporting iZettle since its inception in Sweden and believe the pilot in the U.K. is another important step towards enabling commerce, by offering cardholders and micro-merchants the choice to make and receive payments in an innovative new way.”

Jacob de Geer continues: “We’ve had a great response from our users in the Nordics market and are looking forward to getting feedback from small businesses and individuals in the UK who have previously been limited to cash, cheques or invoice as payment methods.”

“I am delighted to announce the signing of iZettle,” said Werner Decker, Senior Vice President, American Express Merchant Services Europe.   “Small businesses in the U.K. can by using iZettle, in a simple and secure way, now offer their customers greater payment choice.  In addition, our Card members can now use their American Express Cards to pay for products and services from merchants who earlier didn’t have a solution to accept cards.”

With more than 50,000 users today, iZettle has increased the number of point of sale (POS) card acceptance terminals in the Nordic by 10 percent since it began operation in Sweden last September and expanded to Denmark, Finland and Norway in February this year.

Today, there are 20 million small businesses in Europe that only accept cash or invoices, according to Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union.

iZettle Begins Mobile Payments Test In UK was originally published at Money Watch a UK personal finance blog. Sign up to our RSS feed and follow us on Twitter.

If you’ve made a PingIt transaction between 2pm last Friday (4th May) and noon this Friday, fill in the form on the Barclays website to enter the competition. You have to be over the age of 16 and be prepared to have your name published on ITV and in Barlcays’ promotions.

As long as you make at least a £1 payment to another UK mobile number, your transaction will be used to confirm your entry to the competition.

The winner will be contacted between 11 and 12 May 2012 and announced on ITV during the advert break for Britain’s Got Talent on Saturday evening, 12 May 2012. Please see competition terms & conditions for full details.

You can download PingIt for iPhone, Android and Blackberry. Find out more about Barclays PingIt here on Money Watch.

Win £10,000 With Barclays PingIt was originally published at Money Watch a UK personal finance blog. Sign up to our RSS feed and follow us on Twitter.

The list includes a lot of the usual suspects, such as voucher app VoucherCloud, Groupon‘s deal app and price comparison scanner RedLaser, but there are also a few less obvious apps on the list.

These include Supermarket, an app to help you work out whether it’s worth bulk buying whilst browsing the aisles, and MyGas, which helps you find the cheapest petrol in your area.

Read the full article at TechRadar. For more apps, view the top personal finance iPhone apps.

10 Apps To Save You Money was originally published at Money Watch a UK personal finance blog. Sign up to our RSS feed and follow us on Twitter.

The service, Quick Quote, promises to return the lowest car insurance quote from 130 insurance companies, if you’ve previously been registered on the Confused.com website. If that’s the case, then you can text the number plate of the car you want to insure, to 66800. Beware though, each text costs £1 (plus your standard network rate).

Here’s Confused.com’s breakdown of how it works, followed by a video of Quick Quote in action:

I’d expect that for those shopping for new cars, this could be a useful way of quickly checking whether the insurance on the car is within your budget, whilst out and about.

But we’d urge you to take care with the quotes provided. As is the case with any price comparison site quote, Confused.com will have had to make some assumptions about the cover you require (such as the amount of excess you will pay on a claim), so before committing to the insurance, make sure it meets your requirements. Changing the features of the insurance will also change the premium you pay, and of course, some insurers do not appear on comparison sites, so in some cases it pays to go direct.

Confused.Com Quick Quote: Car Insurance By Text Message was originally published at Money Watch a UK personal finance blog. Sign up to our RSS feed and follow us on Twitter.

When you enter search terms including keywords such as credit cards, savings and current accounts, you’ll be shown Google’s own results. We’ve tested it out, and found the following example when searching for “best credit cards” (click for a larger view):

A similar sponsored result comparison box is shown for “best savings account“:

There are likely to be lots of different variations of keywords triggering these ads. Google provides an explanation (if you click on the information icon) to visitors as to why it is showing these ads:

Based on your search query, we think you are trying to find a [product name]. Clicking in this box will show you [product name] providers who can fulfill your request. We may be compensated when the user clicks to contact, fills out an application with, and/or recieves a product from a product provider.

Clicking on the ads takes you through to a table of relevant product deals, such as the one below for savings accounts, from where in some cases you can click through to the provider site to apply for the product:

Google has been testing similar ads for a while, but most recently, in February, they seemed to be moving away from showing direct financial comparisons within its search results, when they scrapped their mortgage comparison tool.

But it appears they may have had a change of heart. Google’s acquisition of comparison site BeatThatQuote.com last year always seemed to suggest that they intended to build their own comparison site, and perhaps they’ve finally ironed out all the problems. The small print on these ads actually state that Google is a trading name of BeatThatQuote.com, which sounds like it’s the wrong way round to me.

As ever, we’ll have to wait a while to see if Google perseveres with these financial comparison ads, given all the testing we’ve seen them do before.

We’ve mentioned in the past that they risk stepping on the toes of some of their big advertisers (such as MoneySupermarket or GoCompare) with these ads, and in the examples shown above, they’ve chosen to display their own ads in between the paid for, sponsored listings, and the natural, organic search results. In previous tests their results have replaced the traditional sponsored results, so perhaps they’re trying to minimise the impact on their paying customers, whilst impacting those who have managed to get themselves to the top of the natural rankings.

John Paleomylites, product management director at Google (and previously BeatThatQuote.com managing director), is quoted as saying:

“Today we are introducing a new look comparison unit with enhanced transparency using BeatThatQuote.com expertise and Google technology. The enhanced service is now easier to use for consumers and will provide higher quality traffic for advertisers. We will introduce this improved design layout for searches around credit cards, current and savings accounts in the UK.”

So what do you think? Will Google now stuck with these ads, or are they another experiment that may soon disappear? Would you use Google’s links to the providers, or will you still use comparison sites? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

Google Relaunches Financial Comparisons was originally published at Money Watch a UK personal finance blog. Sign up to our RSS feed and follow us on Twitter.

The Anywhere Working initiative is run by a consortium of organisations including Microsoft, Business in the Community (BITC), Nokia, Regus, Nuffield, Vodafone UK and the Trade Union Congress (TUC).

As well as providing tips and tricks to work smarter, the initiative website also includes a handy savings calculator, which will tell you how much time, money and CO2 you could save by working from home. Enter your home and work postcodes, and it will calculate the distance between them. You can then add how much time and money you spend each day travelling to work, and how many days you intend to work from home, in order to show you your weekly, monthly and annual savings, like this:

The savings shown would happen if I were to work from home just once a week, instead of making the 4 mile round trip.

Once you’ve calculated your own savings, you can then pledge your support for the campaign and sign up to receive offers and giveaways. All you’ve got to do then is convince your boss to let you work from home; point them in the direction of the Anywhere Working website case studies to give them a few good reasons.

And of course, if you’re in London, then the trial of getting to work whilst the Olympic Games are on over the summer will probably provide the biggest excuse to work from home that you’ll ever have.

How Much Could You Save By Working From Home? was originally published at Money Watch a UK personal finance blog. Sign up to our RSS feed and follow us on Twitter.