MasterCard Inc Exploring Partnership With Twitter, Inc. For P2P Payment Service

Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) shares have soared 10% after a report emerged that credit card company Mastercard (NYSE:MA) would be interested in pursuing a payment service partnership with the company. MasterCard’s president of international markets told CNBC:

“We see companies like Facebook and Twitter occupying a really good space in social media and we are always over in Silicon Valley talking to those companies,”

“I think the way we would work with them is just the way we work with the other tech giants, we would figure out what we can do together, where our network could play into their space and connect up. Obvious spaces are if they want to offer payments to their clients and if you think about somebody like Facebook (NASDAQ: FB), it would probably be something like a P2P (peer-to-peer) service.”

Perhaps more investors are aware of Facebook’s P2P service than they are of Twitter’s.Facebook launched a P2P service via Facebook Messenger in May 2015 which Facebook users in the U.S. can use to link to their MasterCard and  Visa (NYSE:V) debit cards. A P2P service basically allows users to seamlessly transfer funds from their bank accounts to another person’s bank account using a mobile phone.

But Twitter’s P2P service actually dates back further than Facebook’s. Twitter launched a P2P service in France in October 2014 through the collaboration with Groupe BPCE, France’s second largest bank by total customers, in a service that allows users there to transfer money to other people via tweets. It’s quite likely that Twitter is happy with the progress of the service in France and now wants to launch the same in the U.S.

Short covering

It turns out that P2P is growing fast in popularity. Perhaps the best-known P2P service is PayPal’s Venmo. During the last quarter, PayPal processed more than $2.5B, or ~3% of the company’s TPV(Total Payments Volume) via Venmo. That was 174% Y/Y growth, so we can surmise that P2P is growing incredibly fast.