As someone who splits bills and sends money to friends, I want to send or receive a transfer without typing out email addresses or account details, So that the whole thing takes seconds instead of minutes.
What This Does
Two ways to skip the manual entry dance when sending money to someone nearby:
QR Code ā generate a scannable code tied to your e-transfer details; anyone can scan it to send you money instantly.
Nearby Transfer ā use Bluetooth and GPS to find Neo users around you and initiate a transfer without sharing any contact info.
Quick lunch option
Use accelerometer, so that when a person opens neo app and shakes the phone the quick transfer UI automatically lunches.
Functional Requirements
Part 1 ā QR Code Transfers
Configure your e-transfer receiving details once inside the app
The system verifies your details are correct by sending and immediately recovering a nominal amount (e.g. $1 CAD)
Generate a personal QR code that encodes all the info needed to send you money
Scan another userās QR code directly from the app to initiate a transfer
When both users have Neo and e-transfer configured:
Scanning a QR code shows the recipientās info and prompts you to enter an amount
Transfer initiates immediately
QR codes are designed to be scannable upside-down ā so when two people face each other, neither has to flip their phone
Part 2 ā Nearby Transfer (Bluetooth + GPS)
Enable nearby transfer mode from within the app
The app detects other Neo users in the immediate area via Bluetooth and GPS
Select a nearby user and initiate a transfer without exchanging any contact details
Related Community Discussion
Thereās already an interesting thread on the forum proposing Tap To Transfer via NFC ā tapping phones together to initiate a transfer. The core idea is similar: frictionless peer-to-peer payments without typing in recipient details.
The QR and Nearby Transfer approach described here is partially a response to why NFC alone is difficult to build reliably:
Apple restricts NFC for third-party apps ā peer-to-peer NFC transfers outside of Appleās own stack (Apple Pay, Wallet) are not accessible to third-party developers, making an iOS implementation effectively impossible without Appleās cooperation
Android Beam was deprecated in Android 10 (2019) and never replaced with a cross-platform standard
OEM fragmentation ā Samsung, Google Pixel, OnePlus and others expose NFC and secure element access differently at the OS level, meaning behaviour would be inconsistent across devices
Cross-platform (iOS ā Android) NFC P2P is essentially unsolved ā thereās no open standard that covers it without OS-level manufacturer agreements
QR codes sidestep all of this: they require only a camera, work identically on every device, and are cross-platform by default. Nearby Transfer via Bluetooth + GPS avoids the NFC access problem while still enabling contactless discovery.
Which would you use more ā QR or nearby? Are there other friction points in e-transfers that would be good to solve?
You only need to type out an email once then it will save in your history. And as for finding Neo users around you. That does feel kind of like an invasion of privacy if you find other people that you arenāt trying to send to, but thatās just my thoughts on this!
The biggest problem I see with all of this is that not only do you have to have the Neo App and use a Neo āChequingā account, but you also need to convince everyone else you interact with to do the same.
I think I prefer just getting their phone number, if I donāt already have it. That way I can send them an SMS test message and confirm they got it before I copy their number over to my banking app so I donāt throw my money into a black hole.
Yep, would be nice to start with that and for Neo more encouragement.
If neo-to neo, than itās possible to āstealā a feature from monobank that has shake to transfer, which is what it sounds: you open app, you and the person who receives the transfer shake your phones, it goes into nearby search mode. then you see your avatar with display name (it can be your real name and picture, but you can put anything there) and voila, you tap the person you enter the amount and tap sent.
Thatās a dope feature, thanks for sharing! Intra-Neo transfers are basically free for us, so we generally like these features. The challenge is that adoption tends to be low since the odds the next person you need to send money to is already in the Neo ecosystem is relatively low. I think Wealthsimple is having this with their own peer-to-peer system at the moment.
Network effect is a big problem.
Though from the product perspective itās an additional opportunity for people to tell about Neo, so
āfree marketingā
100%, so many companies do it in the hopes of driving referrals like Calendly did. And there is a great business case for avoiding e-transfers, which are expensive to us.
You can steal monobankās shake to transfer ( Shake to Pay) feature, itās intuitive, very useful, and you cant improve it much
basically if you want to transfer someone nearby:
you turn on the gps,
open app
shake your phone (accelerometer triggers it)
app start searching the people who did the same
on the screen you see avatar and personās public name (avatar and public name are configurable)
you tap on the avatar, enter the amount
voila!)
during COVID mono pushed a lot into networking and enabled shake to pay for merchants too,
so the standard experience in many cafes became: you scan QR code to open menu, order
and then to pay you shake and pay, or use another QR code to initiate payment process.
basically each table will have their QR code and so on, but that also requires integration with cafes and restaurants.
Itās not ābetterā both have pros and cons.
shake to pay is an old feature, it was basically from the start of mono in like 2016 and it universally works across all devices, so implementation is way easier. It was a novel thing mainly to transfer between people.
In restaurants though it took off during COVID, when less touch is better and also EU vs NA difference - here waiters are āon youā - āis everything ok?ā. In EU they do not disturb you most of the time and you give a sign if you need something. So shake to pay in restaurants - you can pay without waiting for a waiter - which is a bit more efficient. Kinda like self-checkout.
Additionally in UA if you go with friends in cafe/restaurant or whatever, very often one person pays, and the rest just transfers money to that person, in whole my life I canāt remember a single time when we had a āsplit billā.
then in ~2022-2023 they did tap to pay, but! phone-to-phone tap to pay, the card to terminal was there for God knows how long. Why? well you know in Canada thereās ~4 main internet providers? In Ukraine itās ~4,500. Ukraine has a lot of small entrepreneurs and banks enabled easier process for them. So basically your phone can work as endpoint sale terminal - which is huge.
Oh yeah, thatās super interesting! Self-checkout is still pretty innovative here. I think tip culture kind of kills it in restaurants and stuff here. People want a chance to justify their 15%.
Also, why are there so many small businesses in Ukraine? Genuinely curious.
Would you prefer to work for yourself or work for someone?))
But honestly, I do not know. My main guess would be because of a smaller and less stable economy, wherein opportunities are not āplentyā, and you have to create opportunities yourself. e.g., the internet: I remember when it started becoming mainstream; instead of waiting or where to buy it, people started exploring how to make it. And god, there were so many providers in our neighborhood. I guess you can say healthy competition, because we all started on equal footing in 1991.
Tips are a weird one. In EU, a tip is usually for convenience when you pay with cash; instead of 23.48, letās round it up to 25. Me and my friend from EU say the same thing; this tipping is out of hand)) But some establishments started to putting tips into the bill and not as an option, which I personally prefer))
I can see some very useful features on shake too Pay concept and priority would be security, with terminal swapping, the crooks get to swap out a terminal.Iām wondering if this would be a built in fraud protection.
Iām definitely exiting a restaurant without having to wait for a tap to pay terminal.Iām all about.
You can, actually push it as a security feature, especially when the point of sale is also in Neo, Neo will not show fake sellers, no matter what. It becomes multi-factor authentication)
