French bank to launch in-Tweet money transfers

Steven Loeb · October 13, 2014 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/39b1

Twitter has recently begun to break into commerce, launching its own buy button last month

When it launched its buy button last month, Twitter made it clear that it saw commerce as a big opportunity to expand its revenue streams. Right now the company almost  exclusively relies on advertising, which may be unsustainable in the long run if user numbers continue to be stagnent.

Now the company is getting ready to take it a step beyond simply letting users buy goods from a tweet, but it will actually start allowing its users to transfer money to each other, according to various media reports, including Bloomberg

The service will be offered through Groupe BPCE, which is France’s second-largest bank with 8,000 branches and more than 36 million customers. It was first revealed via a press release last month, and it will be reportedly be launched at a press conference in Paris on Tuesday.

Here is how BPCE described it initially: "Everyone with a bank card and a Twitter account in France will soon be able to send money to other users easily, rapidly, securely and free of charge with a simple Tweet."

The service was developed by S-money, the electronic money subsidiary of Groupe BPCE, which provides an electronic wallet solution on mobile phones. No further details about the service are known at this time. Twitter itself has nothing to do with the new service; it was a BPCE led initiative, and the bank used Twitter's publicly available API documentation to build and launch the feature. 

Still, Twitter is fully embracing this new way to use the network, with Olivier Gonzalez, Twitter France's Country Manager, saying in the press release last month, “We warmly welcome this innovation developed by Groupe BPCE and the service it provides to Twitter users in France by integrating its S-Money service into a live, public, conversational dimension characteristic of Twitter."

And why wouldn't it be happy about this? Like I said, Twitter wants to be in the commerce game and perhaps it sees the BPCE product as a trial run for its own, similar product.

Twitter has already started testing a feature to allow users to buy goods directly from inside a Tweet. It works by allowing the user to hit a button; once it is tapped, the user will get more product details, and will be able to enter both their shipping information and their payment information. The information is then sent directly to the merchant. The user literally never has to leave the Tweet. The test is currently being conducted exclusively on mobile, for the time being.

Commerce is a good opportunity for Twitter to branch out beyond advertising as a revenue stream. In its most recently released earnings report, the company posted quarterly revenue of $312 million. Of that, $277 million came from advertising. The other $35 million came from data licensing.

Twitter has recently been having some major issues with user growth, however, which could potentially put its advertising revenue in jeopardy. Brands need to make it worth their while to spend money putting their product in front of as many eyeballs as possible; if they begin to sense that the Twitter audience has become stagnant, or if the service has become passé, they may simply move on.

Commerce is becoming a hot sector in the social media world in recent months, as Facebook launched its own buy button back in July, an indication that the company does see payments as a potentially bigger revenue stream going forward as well.

VatorNews has reached out to BPCE for further comment. We will update this story if we learn more. 

(Image source: thenextweb.com)

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What is Twitter?

Twitter is an online information network that allows anyone with an account to post 140 character messages, called tweets. It is free to sign up. Users then follow other accounts which they are interested in, and view the tweets of everyone they follow in their "timeline." Most Twitter accounts are public, where one does not need to approve a request to follow, or need to follow back. This makes Twitter a powerful "one to many" broadcast platform where individuals, companies or organizations can reach millions of followers with a single message. Twitter is accessible from Twitter.com, our mobile website, SMS, our mobile apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, our iPad application, or 3rd party clients built by outside developers using our API. Twitter accounts can also be private, where the owner must approve follower requests. 

Where did the idea for Twitter come from?

Twitter started as an internal project within the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, and engineer, had long been interested in status updates. Jack developed the idea, along with Biz Stone, and the first prototype was built in two weeks in March 2006 and launched publicly in August of 2006. The service grew popular very quickly and it soon made sense for Twitter to move outside of Odea. In May 2007, Twitter Inc was founded.

How is Twitter built?

Our engineering team works with a web application framework called Ruby on Rails. We all work on Apple computers except for testing purposes. 

We built Twitter using Ruby on Rails because it allows us to work quickly and easily--our team likes to deploy features and changes multiple times per day. Rails provides skeleton code frameworks so we don't have to re-invent the wheel every time we want to add something simple like a sign in form or a picture upload feature.

How do you make money from Twitter?

There are a few ways that Twitter makes money. We have licensing deals in place with Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft's Bing to give them access to the "firehose" - a stream of tweets so that they can more easily incorporate those tweets into their search results.

In Summer 2010, we launched our Promoted Tweets product. Promoted Tweets are a special kind of tweet which appear at the top of search results within Twitter.com, if a company has bid on that keyword. Unlike search results in search engines, Promoted Tweets are normal tweets from a business, so they are as interactive as any other tweet - you can @reply, favorite or retweet a Promoted Tweet. 

At the same time, we launched Promoted Trends, where companies can place a trend (clearly marked Promoted) within Twitter's Trending Topics. These are especially effective for upcoming launches, like a movie or album release.

Lastly, we started a Twitter account called @earlybird where we partner with other companies to provide users with a special, short-term deal. For example, we partnered with Virgin America for a special day of fares on Virginamerica.com that were only accessible through the link in the @earlybird tweet.

 

What's next for Twitter?

We continue to focus on building a product that provides value for users. 

We're building Twitter, Inc into a successful, revenue-generating company that attracts world-class talent with an inspiring culture and attitude towards doing business.

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