You can’t pay with your phone at the register yet, but you can use it to pay the babysitter. MoneySend, an application from MasterCard for sending and requesting money in informal person-to-person transactions, is now out in the BlackBerry App World.
MasterCard’s app lags significantly behind PayPal’s mobile payment app, available for Android, iPhone and BlackBerry, except perhaps that MasterCard has more cache and credibility with older generations. But MoneySend’s shortcomings aside, MasterCard is clearly excited about mobile-enhanced shopping.
MoneySend for BlackBerry is the latest in a slew of MasterCard-branded apps including Marketplace Overwhelming Offers, which pushes users steep daily discounts, Easy Savings Program, which locates nearby discounts from participating merchants, Priceless Picks, an app to encourage shoppers to geotag and share deals, and ATM Hunter.
MoneySend lets users send, request, receive and manage money from the app. Hook the app up to your bank or credit union and link it to your debit card or MasterCard credit card to send money. You can also create a prepaid account through Bancorp Bank, an FDIC-insured online bank. Then manage your transactions, which are subject to some fees, from within the app. No financial data is stored on the device, according to MasterCard.
With MoneySend, both parties have to have the MoneySend app in order to complete a transaction. You can also send money to the mobile phone number of a non-user, who will then get an invite to join MoneySend and pick up the payment. That means until now, a sender would have to be sure the recipient was using an iPhone.
There was speculation that MasterCard’s mobile payments could compete with PayPal’s when the MoneySend iPhone app launched three months ago. That doesn’t seem to have happened. MoneySend has three out of five stars in the App Store, compared to four out of five for PayPal. Simply put, PayPal’s mobile app is more navigable and less restrictive. Also: PayPal’s userbase is larger, you can connect its app to non-MasterCard credit cards and you can first bump to transfer money. But maybe opening MoneySend up to BlackBerry’s well-heeled users will encourage adoption.
