Micro-blogging site Twitter is set to allow its French users to make payments through tweets to their followers.
The social platform has teamed up with S-money – a division of the second-biggest French bank, Groupe BPCE – to offer a person-to-person transfer service to anyone in the country with a Twitter handle and bank account.
While Twitter is yet to confirm whether transactions would be kept private or made visible on other users’ newsfeeds, BPCE’s head of insurance and commercial banking, Jean-Yves Forel, said that the new S-money deal opens up a range of payment opportunities for people on social media.
Twitter France’s chief executive, Olivier Gonzalez, said the platform’s “live, public, conversational” nature made it well-suited to monetary transfers.
The finance industry is facing increasing levels of competition from tech companies making headway in areas such as peer-to-peer lending and money transfers.
Hannah Kuchler, a social media expert and correspondent for the Financial Times, said that networks like Twitter could become a means of identifying people when they carry out online transactions.
The deal with S-money is not Twitter’s first foray into the e-commerce arena; last month, the social platform partnered up with San Francisco-based Stripe to launch a ‘buy’ button, through which users can purchase products directly from tweets. Commenting on the feature, Twitter’s e-commerce head, Nathan Hubbard, said that since interactions between consumers and brands on the site were often transactional, releasing a buying and selling facility made sense.
Twitter has beaten Facebook in the race to launch a transfer facility; the latter network met with e-commerce and financial start-ups based in London earlier this year, and hired former PayPal chief exec David Marcus to head its messaging division.
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