14 DAY TRIAL // Taking a leaf out of Facebook’s book, Twitter is apparently experimenting with a friend-to-friend payment feature in France.
One of France’s largest bank will be teaming up with Twitter to allow its customers to transfer money via tweets. BPCE, the second largest bank by number of customers, seems to be looking into expanding its list of capabilities, just as Twitter is trying to get involved in the world of online payments, Reuters reports.
The bank had previously announced its intention to offer simple person-to-person money transfers via Twitter, regardless of what bank the Twitter consumers were using. The procedure doesn’t even require the sender to know the recipient’s banking details.
“(S-Money offers Twitter users in France a new way to send each other money, irrespective of their bank and without having to enter the beneficiary’s bank details, with a simple tweet,” said Nicolas Chatillon, chief executive of S-Money, BPCE’s mobile payments unit.
The entire process involves allowing money transfers via text message and relies on the data security standards of the credit card industry.
The social network giant and the bank declined to offer more details ahead of the press conference when the feature is introduced officially.
The Twitter Buy button
This is an interesting move from Twitter. The company has recently introduced the so-called “Twitter Buy,” a button that allows users to purchase advertised products straight from a tweet. This works for stores, music artists and more.
So far, however, Twitter has stayed away from actually taking on any of the payment processing job, simply making its platform available for interactions between customers and sellers. At the same time, it’s not surprising that we see an interest from banks into social networks given how they can expand their mobile banking initiatives in this manner. Furthermore, the extremely high reach of these networks explains even more why bank are so interested in this new area.
Facebook's payment tool
It’s also worth mentioning that one developer has recently found some interesting things inside the Facebook Messenger app, namely a way for users to send money to each other via the messaging mobile app.
Facebook has refrained from talking about this new feature so far, but it’s likely that it will become available in the coming months. Mark Zuckerberg discussed a few months ago about the intention to implement such a feature, but there have been no details about it ever since, outside the new screenshots that made their way online.