ZoomPass is clogging up the passing lane

Last month ZoomPass launched in Canada giving Canadians the ability to send and receive money through a new mobile enabled service. Here’s how they describe their new service:

Zoompass is a unique mobile payment service that offers a new way for you to send, receive, and request money quickly and securely, using a mobile device operating on the Bell, Fido, PC Mobile, Rogers, Solo, or TELUS network. With a mobile application that can be downloaded onto your mobile phone and synchronized with your phone’s contact list, you can use Zoompass anytime, anywhere while on the go.

Zoompass funds are held in a stored value account that is linked to your personal bank account or credit card, which makes loading your Zoompass account and transferring money simple and convenient. You can also use the optional Zoompass Prepaid MasterCard® card with PayPass™, linked to your Zoompass account, to make purchases in-store and online or withdraw cash from an ATM.

Think of it as paypal for Canadians that is fully supported and enabled by Canadian carriers.

It’s a great idea that is long overdue for our market.  After receiving an SMS from ZoomPass notifying me that I’ve received $1 from a friend, I decided to register and take this new service for a test drive.

ZoomPass unfortunately was anything but quick or easy.  Here is a summary of my experience:

1. I received an SMS message that $1 had been sent to me. Super!
2. The SMS message contained a registration link. I clicked on it and was brought to a website that was not optimized for mobile as the flash movie showed up as an empty box in my mobile browser. Moving around the broken flash box on,  I found a registration link and began the process. The SMS should have brought me directly to the registration page and that page should have detected I was coming from an iphone and delivered an optimized experience. Many consumers would give up upon seeing a broken / non-optimized page.
3. The registration process was long. I actually abandoned the process and started over again the following day when I had time to go through the entire process. A better practice would be to allow users to stop & save where they are in the process if they need to continue later. Having to start over again will not motivate people to go through the process again… well unless of course there is a ton of  $$$ waiting for them
4. I received another SMS message with a verification code that I was instructed to enter in step 3 of online registration process. I had to then go to my laptop, go to ZoomPass and then enter the verification code received since this simply was not easy / intuitive for me to do on my mobile device.  Ideally when I received the SMS message with the verification key all I would have to do is click on a link that would auto-verify. This would save time, energy and make the experience much better.
5. After successfully registering I realized there were fees attached to actually depositing my $1 into my bank account – which also required extra steps to validate my banking information. At this point I decided to abandon the process

I then read their press release and discovered 2 points of interest:

1. They have a mobile enabled website at zoompass.mobi which I discovered is fully w3c compliant… which means it will work on all mobile devices. Although great,  their mobile website is very basic with little functionality and is designed for the lowest common device denominator.  As very few Canadians on non-smartphones actually surf the mobile web, I think they need to develop a mobile web version that is optimized for today’s devices and should have an auto-detection script enabled on their website that will serve the right version. Having to promote 2 URLs (one for the desktop experience and one for mobile) just doesn’t make sense anymore.  Typing in zoompass.mobi on my laptop should auto-redirect to the desktop version and visa versa when I type in zoompass.com on my mobile device. This is a best practice that is easy to implement.
2. They have a mobile application! I went to the iphone App store and did a search for zoompass and came up with apps for Meteors, Photo Mania, and DinoColor!  I did some further research and discovered that their app is only available for the blackberry storm! Although the storm is a good device, it doesn’t have nearly the market share of the iphone.  Recent industry reports from Admob and others indicate that there are about 2.5 million iphones and itouches in Canada and about 250,000 Storms. Given that the iphone is driving well over 60% of mobile web traffic, it would have made more sense to launch with an iphone App first so that reach & buzz could be maximized. Apparently an iphone app is in the works.

In order for this service to get mass adoption, it needs to be dead simple & easy for the average consumer to find, use, and share with others. It’s still way easier for me to use my paypal account or send an email money transfer (EMT) through my online banking site.

ZoomPass is in beta mode – so I’ll cut them some slack and remain cautiously postive and optimistic about the future of this service.

If they can address some of the usability issues identified above, they will be well on their way to not only being the first multi-carrier supported mobile payment system, but the defacto standard in Canada.