ayeOU started as a one-week project for the Peekabu Team. We were taking a momentary breather from working on our Passage app, which uses our image recognition technology to log users into their account using a picture of their choice, instead of a password. Taking a step back, we were investigating what else could be ‘tagged’ to images. And of course, having split several dinner bills without the correct change before, we immediately thought how we could use our technology to send money conveniently.

We set aside the 5 working days last week to build ayeOU from the ground up, and quickly paired our technology with PayPal’s API to enable transfer and receipt of the money by tagging any given written picture. The use cases of personally sending someone a handwritten note matched well with one of the core USP of this approach: senders don’t need to know any private banking information about the recipient. They can simply tag the note, hand it or post it to their recipient, and their job is done. The app simply collects when the recipient scans it, paying from one account to the other, asynchronously.

We put considerable thought into the back-end mechanics, making sure that private data was kept secure, correctly logged, and that the transfer would be cancelled if the recipient never collected it. In addition, because the act of ‘tagging’ a note would be unfamiliar to some users, we were pleased that the use cases were all too familiar – writing out an IOU may be a little outdated these days, but in the digital world, it makes perfect sense.

We’re currently getting the app ready for our beta testers, and the public can expect a full release later in the year. We can’t wait to see how this takes off.