ING DIRECT updated its iPhone app with the Bump functionality, allowing its Electric Orange Checking account customers to conduct Person2Person transactions. As a result, users can simply Bump two iPhones to securely send money to one another.
In order to start the transfer, Electric Orange customers enter a dollar amount into ING DIRECT’s mobile Person2Person Payment feature and “bump” their iPhones together to initiate an instant payment between two Electric Orange accounts. According to ING DIRECT, this makes it easy to pay a friend back for a meal and avoid the hassle of coming up with exact change.
ING’s research suggests that Person2Person Payment will increase 550% from two million in 2010 to 13 million in 2015. To prove the claim, ING cites its figures which show 200% annualized growth in mobile Person2Person Payment usage in Q1 2011 compared to the last quarter of 2010.
As a reminder, earlier we’ve seen PayPal adding Bump functionality to its iPhone and Android apps.
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