26 March 2010 (updated April 13)

• Fast Company
• Bump Technologies
• Related Post (10April Apple NFC Patent)

Excellent Video overview below (30 sec commercial)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suCe4-SWsHo]

I’m reading the CTIA press and see this come out, wondering how my iPhone communicates with another iPhone. The bump application listens to the iPhone accelerometer and when it reads a bump (when running) it sends time and event to the bump cloud. The bump cloud looks for 2 events and then requests that your bump user information be shared (from bump)

When you bump, if we find a match with a phone that felt the same bump, our servers ask each phone to send up the contact information each user chose to share, but nothing more. If and only if both users then confirm that the match is indeed correct will the contact information be sent down to the other person. None of your personal data is ever stored on our servers.

Very ingenious…. What I’m most impressed with is Paypal’s ability to extend itself in niches like this. Their open APIs, ability to manage risk and extend “payment rails” beyond internet merchants is 5-10 years ahead of what any other payment network can do. Beyond the technology side, it certainly helps that  Paypal’s user penetration within the iPhone’s customer base is “rather high”.

This application also highlights the opportunity for NFC in Apple’s platform. For those that aren’t familiar with my previous posts, industry G2 indicates that Visa and AT&T are going without Apple. Obviously a good strategy for AT&T as Apple already has significant leverage in the “relationship”. Of course, NFC P2P will require an intermediary to own “risk” of card acceptance and work through (payment network related) merchant and third party payment aggregator (TPPA)  issues.

From a regulatory perspective, it is fortunate that PayPal has already gone through the “heavy lifting” in obtaining money service licenses in the 50 states (see related post).

What other vendors/payment networks could compete here? A: CashEdge and Money Bookers. In the UK I could almost envision the video clip for a money bookers “Bump Bet”. In the US CashEdge is a 3rd party service provider with 60-70% of US retail deposit accounts in their footprint (BAC, Wachovia, Citi, …). CE has  a much more efficient (low cost) ACH network and is one of the few US companies with proven operational risk management in “remote” payments. CE should look into riding PayPal’s marketing wave and leverage bump technology to allow me to do everything PayPal does,  only directly from my bank account (at no cost). On the regulatory side, Cashedge runs as a bank service provider… in essence you are dealing with your bank to “push” funds (ACH debit) when you use POPMONEY.

Great job Paypal.