One of France’s largest banks is teaming up with social network Twitter Inc. to allow its customers to transfer money via tweets. The partnership with France’s second largest bank BPCE comes as Twitter explores revenue sources beyond advertising, with an eye on the increasingly-crowded online payments market.
Twitter is racing other tech giants Apple and Facebook to get a foothold in new payment services for mobile phones or apps. They are collaborating and, in some cases, competing with banks and credit card issuers that have run the business for decades.
The bank’s mobile payments unit S-Money will enable French Twitter users to send money to each other, managed by the S-Money service, which usually enables transfers via text message, and uses the credit card industry’s data security standards.
Last month, Twitter started trials of its own new service, dubbed “Twitter Buy”, to allow consumers to find and buy products on its social network. The service embeds a “Twitter Buy” button inside tweets posted by more than two dozen stores, music artists and non-profits.
Twitter’s role to date has been to connect customers rather than processing payments or checking their identities.
