Twitter users in France can now ‘tweet money’

Twitter has teamed up with a French bank to allow users to transfer money by tweet.

Apple recently announced its Apple Pay service for the new iPhones. Facebook is rumoured to be developing apayment system for its Messenger function. Now, Twitter is catching onto the payment revolution by offering users in France the chance to transfer money by tweet.

The social media giant has teamed up with French bank BPCE to offer users a new money transfer service.

E-money subsidiary of the bank S-money is developing the technology, which will be available to anyone who has both a bank account and a Twitter handle within the country.

Designed to be quick and convenient, it will also mean that users don’t need to know the details of the recipient’s bank account. In turn, that could relieve some security concerns.

Nicholas Chatillon, S-Money chief executive, said the company now “offers Twitter users in France a new way to send each other money, irrespective of their bank and without having to enter the beneficiary’s bank details, with a simple tweet.”

Person-to-person (P2P) payments are an important frontier at the moment, but it isn’t just the social networks that are trying to break in on the action.

For example, it was also S-money that surprised many when it announced it had developed a P2P service for Google’s nascent Glass technology.

It makes perfect sense for Twitter to look at payments as a next logical step. It is already working on mechanisms such as adding Amazon products to a user’s wishlist through a simple tweet – though they have to go directly to Amazon to complete the purchase. Rumours that it had been developing a “Buy” button were confirmed in September, while payment startup Stripe was named as the force enabling the transactions.

However, it may also be an important part of a strategy to boost Twitter’s potential sources of income. The company has famously yet to turn a profit, and alongside ongoing attempts to boost user growth and develop new ways of attracting advertising funds, it seems that the lucrative world of financial services could also be a promising revenue stream.