Snapcash: The Latest Mobile Payment Feature From Snapchat

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snapcash

Here is another mobile payment service. This time, it comes from the emerging social media service, Snapchat.

Recently, Snapchat has announced a partnership with mobile payments service Square to introduce its latest service called Snapcash. Basically, it’s a payments feature that lets you transfer money between accounts on the ephemeral photo-sharing platform. Square will handle the actual cash movements in the new feature. This collaboration will also provide Square with access to Snapchat’s more than 100 million monthly active users.

For now, Snapcash is only available to Snapchat users in the United States who have a debit card and are 18 or older while the minimum age requirement to use Snapchat is 13. The feature is going to be released on Android immediately, with iOS availability expected soon, according to a Snapchat spokesperson. When Snapchat users sign up for Snapcash, they are also creating a Square account. Users must add a debit account, which is stored by Square, yet Snapchat said it will not store any debit card information. After that, transferring money is quite simple. A user can swipe into a chat, type a dollar sign and amount and hit the green button.

Snapchat declined to discuss financial details of the partnership. The addition of a payment capability adds to Snapchat’s recent push to move beyond its origins as a chat application. The company is already in talks with media companies to develop content for its platform, recently began running ads, and moved into the live event space. Now, the social media company has became a new competitor in the mobile payment and money transfer battlefield that is currently led by Venmo and PayPal.

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Trust is an important issue for the company following a massive leak of pictures and videos from the app. The upside for Snapchat is that its young user base does not seem phased by security concerns.