Twitter Inc share price down, beats Facebook in the money-transfer race

The social media giant launched a new initiative in co-operation with one of Frances largest banks to let its customers make money transfers via tweets.

Twitter is the next tech company to strike a deal with a bank regarding new payment methods online. Groupe BPCE, Frances second-largest bank, said last month that it was ready to offer simple person-to-person money transfers using the medias network.

“This initiative is a good example of our innovation strategy regarding payments. Groupe BPCE is the first banking group to offer individuals a payments solution where they can transfer money with a simple tweet,” said Jean-Yves Forel, chief executive in charge of commercial banking and insurance.

Nicolas Chatillon, chief executive of S-Money, BPCE’s mobile payments unit, commented: “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.”

The two companies declined to provide any additional information about the service, it is still unknown whether the transaction made via Twitter will be kept private or visible to people you know.

Last month Twitter started a new idea on its own. The social media embedded “Twitter Buy” button on tweets made by stores, musicians and many others. This enabled users to purchase products directly from a tweet. The transactions are processed by Stripe, a start-up company based in San Francisco. One of the first who joined the initiative were Burberry, Home Depot and music artists such as Pharrell and Megadeth.

Nathan Hubbard, head of Twitters e-commerce said that conversations between brands and consumers made on the platform were often regarding purchases, so enabling “Twitter Buy” button was an obvious next step.

“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 AITE Group, for Business Insider. “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 banks existing mobile banking initiatives,” he added.

Twitters shares went down 17% this year, while Facebooks, its main competitor, went up 35%. This new service is yet to prove its profitability, calming down the worried investors.

“Twitter wants to more explicitly demonstrate the overall value of its network as an advertising platform.” said Thomas Husson, a marketing strategy analyst with Forrester Research. He also shared that the company is likely to put more effort into future relations with banks and credit card firms in order to increase revenue.

Twitter Inc slipped 8.84% on Friday in New York and closed at $50.40 per share, with a day low of $50.30 and a day high of $55.66 per share. Shares were down 4.91% at 39.56 euros at 8:02 GMT on Monday in Frankfurt. The company is valued at $31.01 billion. According to the Financial Times, the 33 analysts offering 12-month price targets for Twitter Inc have a median target of $58.00, with a high estimate of $65.00 and a low estimate of $25.00. The median estimate represents a 15.08% increase from the last price of $50.40.