Bump now lets you hand out money by tapping your phone

Bump, the wildly successful iPhone app, is joined today by sibling app Bump Pay, a new tap-to-send-money application.

The app is pretty much what the name says: You pick an amount of money to send, bump phones with a friend, and voilà, money is magically sent from your PayPal account to your friend’s.

The app is available today on the Apple App Store for U.S. folks; we’re assuming we’ll be seeing other locations and platforms opening up soon. The main Bump app is currently available for Android, as well.

“Bump Pay solves the problem we all feel every day when splitting a lunch bill or buying movie tickets for a group of friends,” writes Bump co-founder Dave Lieb today on the Bump blog. “Inevitably someone doesn’t have cash, and keeping track of IOUs is a pain. In fact, Bump Pay was originally a tool that one of our developers created just for our own internal use to settle up after lunches out, but we liked it so much that we’ve decided to open it up.”

The Bump team has been focusing a lot lately on simplicity — doing one thing, and doing it well. In a recent update to the company’s core app, the crafty product folks managed to whittle Bump 3.0 down to just two features. At that time, Lieb told VentureBeat, “Technology is a big enabler, but it can also make things way more complicated. We took the great part of technology and kept the simplicity of how you want to share things.”

That same simplicity is now being applied to the mobile wallet/mobile payments issue. When users download the app, they’ll only be asked to enter their email address to get started.

“The app uses PayPal to process the payments, so there are no new accounts to create, and it’s totally free as long as you have your bank account linked to your PayPal account,” Lieb continued. “After the initial setup, there is absolutely no typing required, and you can pay someone in about five seconds.”

When Bump 3.0 launched, Lieb hinted that the team wanted to bring the trademark “phone bump” action and the shop’s new focus on beauty through simplicity to a lot of other needlessly complicated areas of modern life, from music and media to money. Bump Labs, the “internal incubator of sorts” that Lieb credits with cooking up Bump Pay, will be aimed at bringing that ease to a few other verticals soon, as well.

“We see many other problems in our daily lives that could be solved with the philosophy, technology, and design that yielded Bump,” Lieb writes in the post. “Our mission at Bump is to solve real problems that people have in their lives by making connections between people and between devices as simple and accessible as possible.”