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 The move by Groupe BPCE, France's second largest bank by customers,
coincides with Twitter's own 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.
The bank said last month it was prepared to offer simple
person-to-person money transfers via Twitter to French consumers,
regardless of what bank they use, and without requiring the sender
know the recipient's banking details.
"(S-Money) 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," Nicolas
Chatillon, chief executive of S-Money, BPCE's mobile payments unit,
said in the statement.
Payment by tweets will be managed via the bank's S-Money service,
which allows money transfers via text message and relies on the
credit-card industry's data security standards.
BPCE and Twitter declined to provide further details ahead of a news
conference in Paris on Tuesday to unveil the service.
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.
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"At the moment, banks are probably viewing Twitter and other social
media networks as marketing channels to reach a wider set of their
customers and to extend the bank's existing mobile banking
initiatives," he said.
Twitter's success in developing additional services on its platform
as Facebook has done will be key to its future profitability.
Rakuten Bank in Japan offers a similar "Transfer by Facebook"
service that lets users of its mobile banking app send money to
anyone in their Facebook friends list.
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.
(Editing by David Evans)
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