Mobile Payments for the Babysitter With Bubble and Modulr

The comic strip “Adam”, later to be known as “Adam@Home”, offered pithy if poignant wisdom about babysitting services. The two main characters, a mother and father out for the night, exchanged dialogue to the effect of “What do we owe the babysitter?” “Our eternal gratitude…and $25.” While the gratitude part will likely never change, the amounts involved will, and paying off that valuable babysitter is about to get a bit easier with a new team-up between Bubble and Modulr.

Bubble, for those not familiar, is a digital marketplace that allows a simpler way for parents to make payments to a babysitter by non-cash means. Right now, the Bubble marketplace represents 25,000 parents and 15,000 babysitters, a move that likely ensures plenty of work for the ambitious young sitters. Working with Bubble has one major flaw for the sitter, however; it can take up to three days to get paid through the service.

Enter Modulr, an authorized e-money institution that revamped Bubble’s manual payment systems, and brought in a Representational State Transfer (REST) application programming interface (API) to reduce the time spent in transferring cash from three days down to just a few hours.

Best of all, Modulr represented direct cost savings for Bubble, saving somewhere between 20 and 30 pence—about $0.28 to $0.42 as of this writing—per transaction. Given that Bubble pays out over 60,000 pounds sterling a month to babysitters, that little bit adds up.

Faster payments are often better, and though cash would be the fastest payment of all, there is a certain convenience factor to not counting up the babysitter’s change at the end of the night. It simplifies the process, speeds up the transaction, and means that the babysitter doesn’t have to walk home—which he or she well might depending on location—with a pocketful of cash. Throw in the cost savings and it’s a no-brainer for Bubble, and the babysitters involved are likely pleased as well.

The end result is a win-win all around, and these are the best kinds of transactions. While the eternal gratitude of parents allowed a night out will never change, some things about the process will. When those changes end well all around, the benefits speak for themselves.