Twitter users in France can now tweet money to their followers, as the messaging platform beats Facebook by enabling person-to-person money transfer, reports The Finnacial Times.
S-money, a division of the second-largest French banking group by customers, Groupe BPCE, has teamed up with Twitter to offer the service which will be available to anyone with a bank account and a Twitter handle in France.
Jean-Yves Forel, Groupe BPCE chief executive in charge of commercial banking and insurance, said in a statement that the S-money initiative opens up a whole new range of payments opportunities on social networks.
“This initiative is a good example of our innovation strategy regarding payments. Groupe BPCE is the first banking group to offer individuals a payments solution where they can transfer money with a simple tweet,” he said.
Olivier Gonzalez, chief executive of Twitter France, said the home of the 140 character message was well suited to payments because of its “live, public, conversational dimension”.
The company did not say whether the transaction would be kept private, or visible to people you know, as many are on the PayPal-owned app Venmo.
Traditional banks and other financial services companies are facing competition from technology companies in areas which stretch from money transfer to peer-to-peer lending with start-ups such as Lending Club and Prosper. Social networks in particular could prove to be a way of identifying people when they conduct transactions online.
Twitter last month launched its own “buy” button, to allow people to purchase products directly from a tweet, with its payments enabled by San Francisco-based start-up Stripe. Nathan Hubbard, Twitter’s head of e-commerce and the former chief executive of Ticketmaster, said at the time of the launch that conversations with brands on the platform were often transactional, so enabling buying and selling was an obvious next step.
Read more of this report from The Financial Times.