The current situation is almost comical. "Do you have Venmo? Haven't set that up yet, can you send over Paypal?. No, what about Square Wallet? Nope, what about Gmail?"
I'm not sure how this is possible since doesn't that mean that anyone can just input a debit card and start withdrawing money? It is nice though because people can sign up instantly instead of it taking a couple days.
Seriously though, I don't like Venmo's "cash out" approach, but maybe that's because I don't use it enough to want to carry a Venmo balance.
I don't know how innovative it is, but it works relatively well.
https://www.interac.ca/en/interac-etransfer/etransfer-detail
The back-end is made from ACH/SWIFT which are indeed from traditional financial services. Access to these key services is restricted for liability reasons, although you can indeed make a wiretransfer from most bank accounts online. I can do 4 of these a month without any charges.
You simply load your bank's mobile app and send money to your mate using his phone number. It's pretty simple to set up and works across most major banks here.
Swish got some bad press when Moxie noticed that they "borrowed" some code, but the system is easy to use and seems to work well.
[1] http://blog.nullbyte.eu/open-curtains-in-swish-payments-serv...
It doesn't really make sense for me. I would much rather use a vendor that's sole purpose is to provide a means of money transferring. I don't need the convenience of typing a sigil followed by the amount to send money to friends. If I really can't electronically send them money, I will go out of my way to give them cash at a later date.
Companies have always started in the former, and expanded to the latter to not only diversify their "investments" (using that very loosely), but increase revenue.
It just makes sense. And from a tech company it makes sense in a world where internet banking is still only adopted by ~60% of consumers. (I know, surprised me too.)
A confuseopoly depends on an uninformed public. I'm sure there's some special reason for each of the 20 or so payment services, although I don't have the time and motivation to research. Confuseopolies are designed to screw the end user. So I'm inherently scared away from "payment services". Especially when simple cash is to fast, easy, incredibly cheap, and convenient.
Where we're at right now with payment services is roughly 80s BBS or 90s walled garden legacy services. "Wow, if the whole world were on this BBS or on compuserv then the whole world could talk together... but no there's fifty BBSes in my LATA alone"
Also it feels like improvements have been VERY slow coming. Goals finally got some much needed attention but it's still lacking. I have to do everything manually when my paycheck comes in because their goals come out daily. I don't get paid daily, why would I want that money coming out daily? I just want to set aside money for car/rent/insurance/etc when I get paid, maybe things like "wants" (a new TV, computer, etc) work better for the daily pull but even then I'd rather just set aside $XXX when I get paid through goals.
End of the day, I went with good-old-brick'n'mortar Wells Fargo because (1) I wanted to establish a long-term customer relationship with a bank that can provide me with various credit products (including for business) (2) their ATM network is ubiquitous where I live (SF) and (3) there are many branches with convenient hours for when I want to do something a little off the beaten path.
I don't give a rat's about how quickly a $10 payment is available. I care a lot more about good fraud controls, and the ability to speak to a human being, in person, when things occasionally go wrong.
"OK, here is some random bank's ATM which charged me $44 to get $40 (2 x $20) out, and now you say you don't have $12.5 in change on you ... well, shit." ... "What will you prefer: GWallet or FB ?"
But maybe I'm cynical because I'm in Austin and driving anywhere is just miserable.
On a related note, this continues Facebook's unfortunate user-interface decision to replace the simple "send" button in Facebook Messenger with a row of increasingly crowded and not-particularly-useful buttons to send various "other" things.
Also publicize that you will be giving like $1,000 to 100 lucky fb pay users who have performed at least 5 transactions, after 2 months of fb pay.
I mean Facebook just needs to get a decent initial seed of people to add their info, and for it to be so painfully stupidly easy that every relative on Facebook can now send their nephews/nieces and grand children those $5 birthday gifts so that it spreads.
Your payee has to a) have the FB app installed, b) have a debit card, c) from a US-based bank and d) agree to add that debit card to the FB app.
It's more than just "pay on FB". Enough little hurdles to present immediate adoption friction. Many people know that you can do chargebacks on CCs but can't do that for debit cards so they have reservations about adding that debit card to online transactions (never mind that FB Pay is likely just using ACH in the background).
* gifts
* promote personal posts on news feed
* ads (promote page posts)
* some messages (you had to pay to send a message to mark for example)
* people who enter it just so they can recover their password more easily
I know, I know, it's not the tool...but I am reminded of a certain scene from The Fifth Element...
"I hate warriors, too narrow-minded. I'll tell you what I do like though: a killer, a dyed-in-the-wool killer. Cold blooded, clean, methodical and thorough. Now a real killer, when he picked up the ZF-1, would've immediately asked about the little red button on the bottom of the gun. "
I have seen far too many places -- whether they're side projects, smb, or even enterprises -- completely miss the antifraud step. There are companies like MaxMind who <help identify and somewhat prevent this> but for someone who is above average-intelligence and an apt "carder", it's so trivial to get around.
When I'm tasked by x company -- a bank, company, security team, or someone with a side project -- to run through their site and try to get an order shipped using false credentials, I can't even speak to how easy it is for me to do so with trivial effort. And it's not all fun to see.
There is a company who does gift cards, and they'd ship them out instantly. Once redeemed by the other merchant, bam, they're SOL.
Don't be this company. Don't be this entrepreneur. Don't be this hacker. Reach out to someone who knows what they're doing. If your business relies on conducting transactions, I don't care if it's flowers or dog leashes, or some shit that's going to end up on Shark Tank, you need to have anti-fraud in place.
-bitcoiner's fantasy.
That being said, if you haven't ever checked your 'other' folder you probably should. Last time I saw this mentioned people had missed wedding invitations, potential dates and more from people they weren't facebook friends with trying to reach them.
You get to it by clicking the message icon in the blue bar at the top and then clicking the small text 'other' in the top left of that pop up.
Now if it would work outside the US and in-between different countries, that'd be the killer app. Is there anything close to that dream?
As for outside the US, I was under the impression that most banks provide a free service for these transactions.
As they say, if you could capture 1% of that market ...
IIRC, Square is only able to do this by abusing the "refund" feature of debit cards to credit money to those accounts. I read an article a while back that claimed the banks were not happy about this, and considering shutting it down (or rate-limiting it) in the future.
I then searched for the term on the page and noticed that the term is largely clustered around two threads; one of which the users both drop the name so much I had to check if they worked for the company.
No offense to those who enjoy Venmo and its services, but this thread is a great example of HN commentary echo; it's way louder in here than it actually is.
My friends in the Bay Area, in contrast, are far less likely to know about Venmo and either use none of these options or are pretty fragmented.
YMMV, of course :) it just seems like Venmo has done really well in one particularly large market, and the other ones are still way more fragmented.
http://www.businessinsider.com/venmo-splitting-a-group-check...
I just did a quick run through of my office (Minneapolis/St Paul snowboard, etc. online retailer): asking who has heard of it or uses it. Of the 30 or so I asked, 1 person has it on his phone and he says he never uses it.
I _did_ have a conversation where I was told 'I usually pick it up then they get me back later' which a few people in earshot agreed with.
Maybe there needs to be an app to track who owes you drinks?
Back in my day, I thought we called those things favors. :)
[1]: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/20/after-2-years-in-be...
[2]: http://googlecommerce.blogspot.com/2013/05/send-money-to-fri...
[3]: http://allthingsd.com/20131015/the-money-is-in-the-email/
But this totally tells us about how slow facebook is moving. They had 100x people, 100x money but still end up 2x slower.
You can pay people via gmail now for your email contacts, send money to your personal friends via social media networking. I bought my Uber to work this morning completely frictionless without having to physically use my card.
It's an interesting development of recent years for sure.
Now, using Uber as an example, I request a car, get into the car, and leave the car. You never even need to open the app back up after requesting a car.
I want to send and receive money quickly, easily, and cheaply. Now I'm also seeing what Ted is up to on my news feed. He's my Facebook friend now because we were all at a restaurant last week and they didn't let us split the bill.
I'm sure they realize how much money Google is printing with their shopping campaigns, and FB ads haven't proven to be very rewarding for ecommerce outside of fashion/lifestyle. Adding a major feature like that would be enormous in grabbing some of that market.
User-to-user is just one piece of the puzzle. Facebook has faced a REAL uphill battle convincing advertisers of the value they add in the path to conversion. Anyone who is familiar with cross-channel attribution knows this all to well. Many of FB's recent updates have been big slaps in the face to many advertisers, but this could be a huge win.
It would in essence enable them to go from being what is typically one of the first points in the "generating awareness" stage to being a last touch success. Most advertisers are not savvy to things like attribution (hence one of the reasons AdWords still focuses on last click in their main UI), so being able to say to businesses "here is how much money you earned directly and immediately from your ad" is a huge win for proving the value they add.
Any PMs or engineers at FB--would love to chat with you about this and how it ties into the attribution picture. Seriously--it's a huge problem for you right now.
Despite gmails best efforts to block the dozens of emails offering to send me money, I still get a couple once in awhile, and like most internet users I'm pretty good at deleting them without falling for the scam.
I suspect life will be very rough on early adopters.
People really need to stop repeating this. As someone with over 30+ Facebook accounts (for games) and knows lots of other Facebook gaming friends with 10+ accounts as well as non-gamers who keep 2+ accounts (primary, parents/relatives, cosplay/hobby, work, etc...). I'd discount whatever number Facebook reports by at least 20%.
I'm just trying to illustrate that the amount of steps required is arbitrary and doesn't really indicate security. Sure feeling uncomfortable is fine but at least this way is safer than a physical wallet simply because you can't have your cards or cash stolen and worst case your phone is stolen you can login on a computer and deauthorize the phone (plus you can use a pin).
I have had Venmo for about 4 years now (it started at my school so we were early) and it is tied with Lyft for the startup I could not live without. Last year I sent ~$8,000 and received about $8,500 on Venmo. So a $500 diff but the amount of time it saved me versus transferring that $16,000 any other way is many, many hours.
I don't think Venmo does too well as a business (processing cash for free for years can't be good business) but they have nailed the user experience.
"It seems wrong that an email message from your best friend gets sandwiched between a bill and a bank statement," the company wrote in its announcement blog post for the feature. The service didn't catch on, perhaps in part because Facebook never truly created a friendly or familiar interface for emailing. [0]
In much the same vain, wouldn't it be that users wouldn't like to tolerate their friends who are going to bug them about the $20 they owe from last time since now they have no excuse to avoid payment. Because they can do it right there in the messenger?
This is going to be a whole new level of friends/family and money don't get on pretty well. Maybe just me though.
[0] http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/24/5443454/facebook-retires-i...
Instead, I could see this taking a similar direction as web authentication: instead of "Login with Google+" or "Login with Facebook" buttons, you have "Send $ to Google Wallet" in your FB-pay interface.
I'd also point out that Facebook, by virtue of having a ton of data about their users, is well positioned to do things like identity assertion and fraud analytics; two of the more critical aspects of digital payment. Makes sense to me that they join the fray.
Expired credit card churn is a huge issue for any successful SaaS business, and someone is much more likely to keep their payment details updated with a service they pay through regularly than they are entering one-off CC info. Adding FB to the mix with Apple, Amazon, Paypal and Google would make sense for a lot of companies (although probably entails a whole host of headaches).
What happens if I lose my phone , someone adds himself and send money , oh crap ! But Facebook knows where we are sending money , will it be helpful enough to nab a thief ?
Guess that indicates how much people like Snapcash.
And it's used extensively there. Just last month, during Chinese New Year, WeChat added a feature that let Chinese users send money to their WeChat contacts, following in the tradition where people give red envelopes of money (红包) to family members and friends. From what I hear, it was incredibly popular—I even received one myself from a Chinese friend.
I wouldn't underestimate the potential popularity of this move. Especially once they open this up to countries outside the US.
Expect all of these virtual wallet payment systems to die a swift death once Visa/Mastercard/Citi/Bank Of America/Chase finally pulls their finger out.
Edit: Not only might it increase adoption for the payments system, but it may further entice content creators to join FB's nascent content-platform ambitions: http://digiday.com/platforms/facebook-youtube-premium/
Id rather use bitcoin.
Although I'm sure the team had been working on it for a while (given these were relatively new hires), bringing in the paypal executives helps them have a smoother launch and scale process.
And the Cargill corollary: "Every social media company attempts to expand until it can become a bank. Those companies which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. Here a bank is defined as some entity that stores and records transactions between people "
If a friend had this but didn't have Square, that wouldn't be enough to sway me to put my CC in Facebook. I just don't think I can bring myself to do that.
BTW I just send money using PayPal to a Facebook friend and let him know using Facebook messenger. I would totally use this when it's available.
On a side note - no AmEx or Bank Account option...
Fucking typical.
I'm amused.
Seriously?
"I am a wealthy Nigerian heir of our national oil company. I need my funds unlocked but unfortunately do not have $100 for internet access. Please send $100 and you will get your share of my inheritance in the billions of dollar."
