Nicolas Chatillon, chief executive of S-Money, BPCE's mobile payments unit, speaks at a news conference in Paris on Tuesday. The bank is teaming up with Twitter Inc. to allow its customers to transfer money via tweets.
Reuters/Paris/Frankfurt
One of France's largest banks launched a service on Tuesday to allow its customers to transfer money to other people via tweets on social network Twitter Inc.
The move by Groupe BPCE, France's second largest bank by customers, is an effort to attract attention and users to its S-Money mobile payments unit, which already allows people to transfer money over mobile phones via text message.
Created by the bank using Twitter's open software standards, known as APIs, the service allows French customers to send money to a friend regardless of which bank they use, and without requiring them to know the recipient's banking details.
For its part, Twitter is making its own separate push into the world of online payments as the social network seeks new sources of revenue beyond advertising.
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.
"We salute the spirit of innovation of the BPCE," said Olivier Gonzalez, who heads Twitter France, in a statement.
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. (http://bit.ly/1usnbBG)
The service embeds a "Twitter Buy" button inside tweets posted by more than two dozen stores, music artists and non-profits. Burberry, Home Depot, and musicians such as Pharrell and Megadeth are among the early vendors.
Twitter's role to date has been to connect customers rather than processing payments or checking their identities.
"From the Twitter point of view, there is a limit to their appetite for getting involved in payments processing itself," said Andrew Copeman, a payments analyst with financial services research firm AITE Group, who is based in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Investors have been worried about Twitter's slowing user growth, sending the shares down about 17% this year, while rival Facebook's have climbed 35%.
