P2P payments

Hi all, I just wanted to share a tiny bit of something really exciting that we’re starting to design. P2P payments!

We still have lots of things to do but we’d love to hear your thoughts.

What do you expect from us when sending money to your friends? What about requesting money from them… or even bill splitting?

Thanks!
Hugo

25 Likes

Very cool! I can’t wait for the day when repaying a friend is as quick and easy as approving a photo they tagged me in on Facebook!

Really like the fact that you can easily tag the reason for the payment!

Looks awesome. Would love to see bill splitting, something like:

  1. Pay at retailer
  2. Tap split bill
  3. Select friends (index by phone number in contacts + email + maybe a mondo username? QR Codes like snapchat has?)
  4. The payment appears in friends feeds, they can either tap accept, touchid to pay, or decline

Maybe something interesting would be geo location of the sender and the recipient shown on both ends.

15 Likes

Interesting. What’s the set up of a payee look like?

You just pick the contact from your phone’s contact list. Nothing to set up.

We’re using the same pattern that email clients… type a name, type the amount to transfer, good to go :slight_smile:

3 Likes

Will this work with people who aren’t with Mondo?

1 Like

Good question. For starters it will be just Mondo2Mondo but we’ll do our best to make it work outside Mondo at some point.

We’ll share our progress with you periodically :slight_smile:

1 Like

What about transferring money to other bank accounts?

Yeah, there are a few different ways of doing that, each of them with their own restrictions. We haven’t decided yet but roughly these are the cases:

  1. You pay by typing account number and sort code. Nothing new there, we make a basic transfer and good to go.

  2. You pay by email or text. We send a link that takes the payment’s recipient to a page where they can introduce their account number and sort code. (It shifts the complexity from sender to receiver).

  3. You pay by email or text. We send a link that takes the payment’s recipient to a page where they need to create a Mondo account to collect the payment. That way we ensure the message (long text, emoji ready, maybe pictures, etc.) doesn’t get lost. And, of course, it help us to grow our network.

I guess for what you are suggesting you could use 1) or 2). It probably doesn’t matter because you are both sender and receiver.

Yeah, 1) and 2) is basically everything I need in that case, I tend to move my money around quite a lot!

1 Like

Surely PayM would be worth using for this - if in the contact details you have for someone is a phone number which has been associated for this. At least when sending funds, I don’t know if that has any capabilities to request payment of funds.

Yes, we’ll consider PayM too.

I’ve only used it once (paying from NatWest to Barclays) and the experience was way far from something smooth, unfortunately.

Are you a regular PayM user? What do you think about the service?

No, never had a chance. I tried to sign up for pingit when it first came out but they assume the transaction details are displayed within the first 24 hours which is not the case with my bank at the time.

I have registered my phone for PayM but hasn’t really come in handy yet.

It’s definitely a case of the workflow being complicated but no doubt you can design your implementation in a simpler way :smile:

I’ve tried PayM once or twice, if I understand correctly it’s just a way of mapping the recipient’s phone number to an account number/sort code behind the scenes.

The problem is that if you want to pay someone you’ll have to know if they’ve signed up for PayM, so in the end it’s easier to ask for their account details anyway.

I prefer option 2 from @hugo’s list , with a chance for the recipient to permanently associate their phone/email with their account details so they don’t have to enter them every time they receive a transfer … to be honest this is what PayM should have done from the beginning, instead of denying a transfer to an unknown phone number.

2 Likes

@futureshape I only meant if the other user is not with Mondo. I was assuming there would be a way similar to Facetime (phone number is checked for Facetime availability against database and if so becomes available for use) where Mondo can check through your list of contacts and find out which are setup for PayM and if they are then use that but option 3) would possibly be a much better marketing move at least in the early years.

Option 3, while good for Mondo’s user base, increases the friction to almost unacceptable levels.

Most of my friends don’t want to go through the effort of creating a random app account (they don’t have to use the same apps as I do) in order to collect their money. They’ll most likely ask me not to send the money in that way.

1 Like

Yeah, option 3 is tricky. Full disclosure, we haven’t decided anything yet, as we said, this is just a sneak peek.

Imho It’s not really about forcing people to get an account to grow our network or anything like that, it’s really about giving a better experience, that we can only provide Mondo2Mondo. The way I see it is like trying to talk through WhatsApp with a friend that it’s not in WhatsApp yet. That kind of apps don’t offer any fallback (sending an email would be the obvious fallback for a messaging app, right?), instead they focus on making the experience inside the network so good that it fully justifies the switch for all the parties.

Another really important leg on this is the regulatory side. I’m sure there’s some kind of restrictions (amount limits, usually) about getting money out of accounts without a proper verification of the user on the recipient’s end. We’ll take that in consideration too :slight_smile:

1 Like

@futureshape is right - PayM is simply a lookup table between someone’s mobile phone number and their account number/sort code.

Last time I checked, only about 2.5m accounts are registered with PayM, out of about 30m online-banking users and 45m primary current accounts. The banks haven’t been doing a terribly good job of signing their customers up.

4 Likes

Option 2 is how PayM works currently (I used it for the first time ever, last week!)

I would vote for a combination of option 1 and 2.

Option 1 being: You add someone from your mobile contacts to your Mondo contacts list. As well as their name and picture, you also get fields to add account numbers and sort codes and labels for them. Similar to how you can already add work + home email addresses to a contact and when you write an email, you choose which one you want to send to.

2 Likes