Global P2P Push Continues with Trio of New Services (Oct. 15, 2014)
P2P money transfer continues to gain momentum with a trio of new services announced this week in three countries, all of which use a different medium to facilitate transfer. In India, Kotak Mahindra Bank has launched an online money transfer platform called Kaypay, which enables transfers between Facebook users who have accounts at any of 28 banks that have partnered with Kotak. After registering their bank accounts on the service’s Website, users only need to select the recipient on Facebook and enter a password sent via text message. The service aims to capitalize upon Facebook’s major presence in India, the social network’s third-largest market, with 108 million active monthly users. And, according to Kotak bank, 250 million people in India have bank accounts. Earlier this month, Facebook reportedly had embedded code for a money transfer function into its popular Messenger app. In June Facebook hired former PayPal president David Marcus to head its mobile messaging efforts, signaling the company is prioritizing payments.
Also this week, one of France’s largest banks said it will enable money transfer via Twitter. Groupe BPCE, France’s second-largest bank by customer base, said the service will run atop the bank’s S-Money service, which enables money transfer via text, and will work regardless of what bank the recipient uses. Twitter has been working on several payments initiatives of its own, including testing a “Buy” button that enables merchants to embed special links into tweets that users can click to get additional product details and enter payment and shipping information.
Finally, Italian payment processor SIA has unveiled a new mobile money service that enables funds transfers via smartphone. The app, known as Jiffy, links users’ bank account IBAN codes to their phone numbers to enable real time transfer via text. UBI Banca already has prepared a full-scale rollout of the service, and SIA says other banks have signed on, representing 60 percent of all Italian current accounts.
