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Earlier this month I came across a press release for a digital wallet service called UGO Pay. Here’s a snippet:
UGO launches peer-to-peer money transfer capabilities with the addition of UGO Pay
TORONTO , Feb. 1, 2016 /CNW/ – Canada’s first open digital wallet just got better. UGO Mobile Solutions L.P. (UGO) announced today its third major release in a year with the addition of UGO Pay – peer-to-peer (P2P) money transfers – to its UGO Wallet. Initially available in beta, with more features to come, UGO Pay provides customers with the convenience of digitally sending and receiving money securely and easily from their phones…
So, they added the ability to send money to friends. Remember when Amazon Payments used to allow that? I wondered if UGO Pay allowed credit cards to be used for peer to peer payments. Here’s a bit of their documentation (found here):
From this I gather that:
- You can use a Canadian Visa credit card
- Currently there are no fees
- It might not even be necessary to send money to a friend in order to earn credit card rewards.
- There’s no word on whether the transaction may count as a cash advance (which would ruin the whole thing)
One big potential problem: I can’t find any documentation about withdrawing money. If you load money for yourself or send money to a friend, is there a way to withdraw the money to a bank account? If not, then this could still be a very useful service in the ways it is intended, but it won’t be much good for manufactured spend (manufactured spend is any technique that allows you to spend money with a rewards credit card and get the money back, while retaining the rewards).
If you have a Canadian Visa card that earns rewards and you try this out, let us know how it goes, eh?
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cash advanced. ouch
Or, if they’re willing to put up with the hassle of Non-Circulating Legal Tender, the Canucks can try this: http://www.mint.ca/store/template/home.jsp
[…] A Manufactured Spend opportunity for Canadians? by Frequent Miler. Not sure if this will be very useful for most people, but maybe for some? […]
I tried this already and the payment posted to my visa and MasterCard as cash advances :sigh:
Withdrawing money was also quite difficult. Seems like we’ll continue to get shafted north of the border 🙁
Bummer. Thanks for the data point.
This is very interesting. Thank you for posting this, looks like useful MS. I was hoping to see such posts from at least one of the Canadian bloggers.