While Twitter (News - Alert) is one of the kings of social media it is trying to become the king of another market altogether. On Monday, Twitter and one of France’s largest banks announced a partnership that will allows customers to transfer money through tweets. Groupe BPCE is actually the second largest bank, when it comes to number of customers and the partnership comes in conjunction with a push by Twitter to find new ways of getting revenue beyond advertising.
Twitter is attempting to stage a showdown with Apple and Facebook (News - Alert) over the mobile commerce market. The social media giant has already partnered with other companies in order to try and take advantage to the power of the tweet. Amazon is one of the biggest and most well known retail companies to partner up with Twitter in the last year.
Twitter is likely hoping the partnership with BPCE is going to go a little bit better than the partnership with Amazon. While the ‘Buy Now’ button was something that seemed rather interesting when it was launched, there were a number of problems and another number of limitations. Groupe announced last month it was preparing to offer up single person-to-person money transfers through Twitter for French customers. The offering is said to be something that will work with whatever bank the customers want to transfer money to.
Transfers and payments by tweets will be managed via the bank’s S-Money service. This service had already been working to allow money transfers through text messages. The service currently relies on the credit-card industry’s data security standards. So far, neither BPCE nor Twitter has given a ton of details to how to use the service. It seems likely those details will be forthcoming, considering the service is going to be launching later this week. This kind of a move is said to be an attempt by Twitter to reverse flagging earnings and slow user growth. Just how much the partnership can jumpstart the social media company’s revenues will just have to be seen.
Edited by Maurice Nagle
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