Italian P2P Payment App Jiffy Hits 4.2 Million User Milestone

If you’ve never heard of the Jiffy mobile payment app, then one, you’re probably not in Italy right now, and two, you’re not alone.

I’d never heard of this one either, but while most of us were focused on Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, and the other major brands, one app quietly gained prominence throughout Italy, reaching 4.2 million users by delivering on a point few of the majors were concerned with. It’s an app called Jiffy, and it allows for peer-to-peer (P2P) mobile payments.

Thanks to the new milestone, Jiffy is now the leading figure in P2P mobile payments in the entire “euro area”, reports note, and is at last report second only to Swish, currently operating in Sweden with a combined user count of around five million. It’s currently beating the third place competitor, the UK’s Paym system, which counts 3.5 million users to its credit.

With Jiffy, users get the ability to both send and receive money using a cell phone number as the account in question. Users commonly use Jiffy for smaller amounts, with the average transaction size being about 50 euro. Forty percent of all transactions are actually under 25 euro in amount, which proves that it’s in demand for the smaller transactions overall.

It proves one thing conclusively: people want the ability to render payments from one person to another, not just to go shopping. We’ve seen it in the United States as Venmo made a splash, and we’re also seeing it in the fact that there’s a top three list in the Eurozone alone.

The fact that mobile payments haven’t taken this technology on more often is downright shocking; we’ve got more than enough use cases for people to send payment from one person to another, but why haven’t the major firms stepped in to get a piece of this action as well? It’s possible they were too focused on the retail market, but you’d think someone would have filled this gap in well before now.

Still, opportunity is opportunity, and at the end of the day, some mobile payment enterprises stand to get ahead on the strength of that new opportunity.