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Twitter now allows for money transfers via tweets

• Egon Kilin
• October 14th, 2014

Twitter is working with a French bank to enable money transfers via tweets. The bank Groupe BPCE is the company that’s behind this and the payments will be paneled by the bank’s S-money service, which already allows transfers through text messages. The service was only able to do the transfers from mobile to mobile, but now they can make their S-money service better known thanks to Twitter. One of the benefits of the service is that you can send money to anyone via a text message on their phone regardless of which bank they use, and without knowing their banking details. The Twitter transfer will presumably be done via direct messages for the sake of privacy.

The company is already offering the service through SMS so one would think that it’s pretty easy to implement something similar on Twitter. But then why haven’t they done this sooner? It’s most likely due to security reasons as we are talking about the world’s biggest chat room after all so they have to do it right in order to make sure that people’s money are protected. No one can really blame them for taking precautions and people will surely be thankful that they did once they’ll successfully start transferring money over Twitter.

Meanwhile, Twitter hasn’t said much about this deal except for calling it “an ingenious” use of the platform. Apparently there is no real partnership between BPCE and Twitter, but the latter certainly seems to endorse it. As it stands, the micro-blogging platform will likely not benefit from this directly apart from showing people its potential and the fact that it has more uses than we give it credit for. Admittedly, people are talking all the time about how Twitter can become much more than what it currently is and we finally get to see some other potential uses. Let’s hope we’ll get to see many more in the near future.