French bank turns to Twitter for money transfers
One of France’s largest banks,Groupe BPCE, launched a service on Tuesday to allow its customers to transfer money to other people via tweets on social network Twitter Inc. (TWTR.N).
Groupe BPCE [BPCE.UL], 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.
“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.
The service embeds a “Twitter Buy” button inside tweets posted by more than two dozen stores, music artists and non-profits.
Investors have been worried about Twitter’s slowing user growth, sending the shares down about 17 percent this year, while rival Facebook’s have climbed 35 percent.
Thomas Husson, a marketing strategy analyst with Forrester Research, said Twitter was likely to multiply efforts to explore new ways to generate revenue with banks and credit card firms.
“Twitter wants to more explicitly demonstrate the overall value of its network as an advertising platform,” he said.
Source: Reuters- French bank turns to Twitter for money transfers
