When it comes mobile banking in Canada, a report came out last week that informed us that we’re “at the tipping point in terms of adoption”. Some financial institutions have release apps that can gives you the ability to show your account balance, but I wanted to really see what “Zoompass” was all about. If you remember about 6-months ago the big 3 (Rogers, Bell and TELUS) announced a joint venture that formed Canada’s first mobile payment service.
Zoompass gives registered users the ability to send, receive, request money, check your account balance, review transactions directly from your mobile phone. To register is free but the service costs $0.50 to send and withdraw money.
I met up with Robin Dua, President of EnStream, for a few minutes and he put the service to the test on his BlackBerry. This app is also available on iPhone and Android devices, pus other platforms via their zoompass.mobi site. You’ll see in the video that it’s pretty simple to use and Dua says “what we are working towards is allowing customers to transact with the phone at the point of sale, that’s the ultimate goal. Right now what you are seeing here is over-the-air (OTA)… directionally where we want to go is we’re building technology and applications to allow for transactions to occur with an NFC enabled handset or a contact-less enabled handset at the point of sale”. Zoompass is working with Rogers, Bell and TELUS to bring NFC-enabled phones to the Canadian market in the near future.
