Barclays was something of a pacesetter within the mobile space for some time now, from the P2P money transfer service it launched last year, Pingit, to its experiments with NFC chips, and its varied range of apps.

Its latest mobile offering, from its Barclaycard division, is Bespoke Offers. Because the name suggests, it is a personalised deals service, available through an app or site.

The launch has attracted lots of press attention, and is supported with the type of national campaign you’d expect, but what is the app actually like

Deal with it

The app requires users to register, and requests that they share some basic information to assist with the customisation aspect, starting with their age, gender, and address. Users may additionally select their interests, from a sequence of profiles reminiscent of ‘Foodie’, ‘Motoring Enthusiast’, or ‘Eco Conscious’. 

It’s hard to inform how much of an effect selecting these has at the ‘bespoke’ part of the service as of yet, as a message warns that ‘it will take approximately 48 hours on your changes to be reflected’ within the app.

The offers themselves represent a powerful range of partners – including Starbucks, Pizza Express, House of Fraser, and Tesco – but they do not look like exclusive to the app, with a number of the deals available either currently or prior to now on other deals services.

The app itself has a clean white and blue design, however appears to have faith in a nested web browser to display the offers, meaning that the pages occasionally load slowly or simply return a blank screen or error message.

For now, Bespoke Offers isn’t an ideal product, and it’s hard to determine it making waves inside the already cramped daily deals space, but with enough commitment inside the long time, it can make a neat addition to the Barclays portfolio of apps.