When PayPal updated its mobile app March 15 it removed one way you were able to send payments: Bump, a feature that was available in the app since 2010. Starting Thursday, however, Bump is offering the capability on its own in the form of a new standalone app called Bump Pay.
Bump Pay lets you pay a friend by typing in the amount of money you’d like to send, and then tapping your phone against your friend’s phone. Money is sent via PayPal, and the only transaction fees you’ll be charged are those coming from PayPal. If you have enough money for the transaction in your PayPal account or have your PayPal account linked to a bank account, then those fees will be zero.
“We think of Bump Pay as solving a specific problem — helping people repay each other in person after having dinner or after paying for gas on a road trip, ” Dave Lieb, CEO and co-founder of Bump told Mashable. “Bump is focused on making technology simpler and our Bump app is a quick and easy way for people to transfer contact information and photos, and we think something like paying someone back should be just as easy.”
Bump says the traditional Bump app has been downloaded by more than 80 million people and is currently used to share millions of contacts and photos each day.
Bump Pay is a product of Bump Labs, the company’s internal incubator of sorts. In Bump Labs employees work on some of their latest ideas that may potentially result in standalone products or incorporated into the traditional Bump app. Some are ideas that originate in hackathons, while some are ideas the company has been pursuing for some time. Bump Pay was originally a tool that created for internal use by the Bump team to help split up their own lunch bills.
The service will initially only be available for iOS devices and will only work with PayPal payments, however, Lieb says it is not out of the question for Bump to consider adding support for other payment methods in the future.
Posted by Janine E. Mooney, Editor
March 29, 2012
