P2P Odyssey Gets Bumpy

As you know, I’ve tried a couple different P2P applications, Venmo, ZashPay and PayPal. And I’m always on the lookout for the P2P mechanism which will win the P2P race. Recently, my P2P journey got bumpy.

Bump is an app for Smartphones (available for iPhone & Android phones) which enables you to share by physically “bumping” the phones together. Share what? Contacts, videos, photos, and money, just to name a few.

So, I enlisted the help of my latest guinea pig, Adrian Brown, Education & Professional Services, here at The Payments Authority. First, we downloaded the Bump and PayPal apps. It was the blind leading the blind here, but hey, we’re both Gen X’ers so to all of you Gen Y’ers, please give us some slack.

Hoping the app is user friendly, we fired up the PayPal app and selected, “Pay with Bump.” I selected Adrian from my contact list and we waited for the Bump App to “warm up.”  Oops, location setting has to be ON. Try this again. The app indicated it was warmed up and ready. We started bumping the phones together and we got an error message that said, “No match.” Upon researching this problem online, I discovered “No match” means one or both of our phones wasn’t getting 3G or a Wi-Fi signal (necessary to bump). Picture Adrian and I standing near the window, one leg up in the air trying to get a signal. Reminds me of the old TV rabbit ear antennae days when my Dad would send me with tin foil over to the tube to try and get a better picture. Some things never change, eh?

Meanwhile, since  Adrian is a contact in my phone and he has a PayPal account, I noticed that I could pay him simply by choosing him from my contact list or entering his cell number. No need to Bump! So, this Gen X’er is wondering…if it is so easy to simply select a contact AND I don’t need to be in the same proximity in order to Bump, why would I want to? Obviously, because it’s cool (duh).

If you would like to check out Bump, here is a video of the CEO talking about Bump and more info here. Part II of this blog coming when Adrian and I find a common signal. We’ll keep you posted. Have you tried Bump? Let us know how it worked for you.

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Denise Bahs, is an Accredited ACH Professional (AAP) and a member of The Payments Authority Marketing team. Read More