I think it's interesting that we can now pay almost anybody we have contact with, at almost zero effort and without even having to remove my debit card from my wallet.
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.
How are we back where we started? If I need to send my friend a payment and they are not in the same room with me, I couldn't do it with cash or checkbooks. Now I could send a friend money in about 5 clicks on my phone.
Not really. Cash and checkbooks require you pulling out a some form of tender, divvying out the correct amount or writing the amount out, and then handing the tender to the cashier.
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.
SnapCash and SquareCash are one & the same. I think it's a great convenience to add CC to my FB, but since I do not use a real name, do not trust FB, and would be concerned about my account being compromised (though it probably makes you enter a CSC/PIN), I will not be using this any time in the near future.
I personally use SquareCash all the time, and also use PNC bank's complimentary POPmoney setup to transfer funds for free (with PNC, I scheduled a partial rent payment to go to my landlord's bank account automatically every paycheck).
How often do international transactions actually occur though (for small payments between friends)? I feel like it is such a small market it probably is not worth the extra hassle from a legal/fraud standpoint.
As for outside the US, I was under the impression that most banks provide a free service for these transactions.
> just enter bank issued debit card for fee-free transactions.
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 believe that was only speculation as to the method.. Though the alternative that was speculated was transfers at a loss to Square (with an increased user base as the motive).
But with both Google and Facebook essentially being advertising companies a notable amount of people are hesitant to give them access to personal data. That could be a real hindrance to them becoming ubiquitous payment providers.
> a notable amount of people are hesitant to give them access to personal data.
I bet this number is much lower than you think it is. People outside of the tech/hacker scene don't care about privacy (in this context). "Who cares if Facebook knows that I went to McDonalds?"
I tend to agree with that, regardless. My general take is that i want life empowering features driven by data. Of course, i would prefer to not give X company my data, but until a home-brew solution comes to light it's unrealistic for me to expect privacy and these types of features. In the end, i want the features. I want Google Now (well, i want what it represents.. it still sort of sucks haha).
Honestly, if said data is used to generate some demographic profile in order to show me less irrelevant ads while still paying for these incredibly useful services, I don't terribly mind. Advertising has been around for a while but being able to guess what might apply means less reliance on sheer volume in order to get the same value from the "ad space". I completely understand the ways this can backfire (shadowy three-letter agencies stealing that profile info, leaks that reveal info that someone figures out how to tie to your identity, etc) but those things are already distinct possibilities with credit card companies, email providers, loyalty cards, medical records, and a host of other things. Leveraging information to create valuable services that would otherwise not be possible is probably not going away anytime soon. At least this way it's easy to split bar tabs or cab rides.
Now I see why they hired former paypal guys, David Marcus [1] and Stan Chudnovsky [2]
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.
Wow, this is a really interesting play by Facebook to gather finance details of their users. I can absolutely see an scenario where friend X wants to pay friend Y who hasn't enabled Pay and they nag until friend Y does sign up. The cycle will continue. It's probably part of a bigger venture into eCommerce for Facebook.
I think they're aiming to enable people to buy from ads without ever leaving Facebook. Reduces friction for the buyer and has the potential to be a major source of revenue from ecommerce companies.
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.
It's an interesting feature, but it seems unlikely that enough people will add their card information to Facebook to make it worthwhile, considering that both the payor and payee need CC information included for the payment to work.
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.
No, they then tell the payer, pay me with this instead, I don't want to sign up for this. The usual use case is giving money back for restaurants and such, so you have the social closeness to do this.
I'm curious, too. Given that they have hundreds of millions of users and most (that I know) don't seem to care one way or the other about the privacy implications, I don't see usage being an issue at all.
I've never really been on FB that much, so this may be fueled by that.. but i would hate adding my CC info to FB. Generally speaking i am very loose with my CC.. i don't worry about it too much, and give it out often. With that said though, FB (to an outsider) has had a history of sketchy FB apps doing sketchy shit with your data/feed/etc. This has seemed to install a distrust of FB and the FB-app ecosystem in me.
Not sure if that's common or not, and i'm sure i'm in the minority, but nevertheless i figure it's a valid thought. To be clear, i'm not saying that they shouldn't be trusted, i'm saying that to a FB-ignorant person, i'm not too trusting of them.
Note: This has nothing to do with anti FB/"FB data" type of people.
Agreed, the network effect works seriously in FB's favour here. Do I add my payment details and get back the £20 an acquaintance sent me or do I wait until I see them and hope we both remember?
Once you're signed up then FB have dropped the barrier to making further payments with their platform, which presumably is the purpose of this from their point of view.
It's not that people won't eventually add their debit card
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).
After a week or so for people to adopt it send out $1 gifts to 100,000 (or however many that will represent a rounding error in dollars) people with accounts meeting some set of activity requirements, who have not yet signed up. They then have to enter their info to claim it, once their info is entered they have no barrier to use it and may send money to others further spreading it.
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.
Yes, they should do that. And I can't think of anything more annoying than needing to receive a text, just so I can log into dumb old Facebook. (I realize there are other "factors" available but that's not really the point.)
It would be interesting if a user's social graph could be used to assess creditworthiness. If so they could remove a lot of friction either by reducing fees or assuming a certain degree of credit upfront.
"Hey RELATIVE it's me here on Facebook I had to get a new account because I'm in trouble here in FOREIGN COUNTRY so please send me money. It's really easy and I need it bad! Just enter your credit card and I will be saved!"
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. "
PayPal didn't start as an anti-fraud system? It was a payment system that developed a pretty novel anti-fraud system and which was the foundation for a different company that does a ton of anti-fraud.
"Confinity Inc. is best known as the creator of PayPal. It was founded in December 1998 by Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, and Luke Nosek, initially as a Palm Pilot payments and _cryptography_ company. Confinity launched its milestone product, PayPal in late 1999."
In the book "Founders at work", there is a chapter about Paypal's founder and half his interview is about how banks told them they'd be crushed by fraud, then how fraud was probably eating up 10-30% of their transfers, then how they built such an incredible alrogithm against fraud that they had to build a room around the server to protect their trade secret.
Actually the key differentiator of PayPal, at least according to Thiel, is it wasn't an algorithm. It was a method to abstract the transactions enough to allow a fraud analyst (not a computer, or even a computer/data scientist), to interpret the patterns.
It had some cute name that I can't recall right now. Hugo or something? It was spun out into a separate company to use the same philosophy to fight terrorism. That company is Palantir and seems to be Thiel's opus magnum.
Oh wow. That's crazy how it seems never to be mentioned in the history of the "PayPal Mafia," or at least not the ones that I've read. Cool info, thanks.
Yeah, with Bitcoin you just get to hope the person on the receiving end isn't gonna fuck you over. Either that or you build anti-fraud as an escrow service, or some other system of trust. So really, the same applies to your precious Dunning-Krugerrands.
Even lower-level, anything consumable by, well, anyone, quickly transforms from add-to-cart, checkout, and ship (whether digitally or physically), to add-to-cart, checkout, make sure they're actually the cardholder and legitimately authorizing the purchase, ship.
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.
Depending on how often the merchant is bitten by fraud, they can require to see an ID card for certain types of transaction (such as cash or check), or raise prices to cover the fraud costs.
Generally, they try to ensure that the liability shift is on the bank's side, by using an EMV capable system for most payments. Of course, that usually requires them to have a specific contract; banks, on their side, perform a risk assessment to ensure that they won't be covering too much fraud.
It's difficult but it comes down to loss-prevention.
I could setup a site with a front-facing flower shop, accept orders, take in the peoples $$ legitimately, and then transact and fulfill their orders (via fraud) on 1800flowers.com for example.
I realize that anyone could do this for anything, but the weaker your weak points are, the easier it is to capitalize on them.
Well in this case it looks like you need to be friends, so any spam requests from non-friends would likely go into the never seen abyss that is the 'other' folder.
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.
It may be limited to the platform apps... didn't see anything like this in the web interfaces. That said, it's always a pain... ironically the least painful (if both parties have a chase account) is chase's quickpay...
Simple dominates all of these, in my opinion. It is perfect from a user experience side. (If people already have the service, but people really want the service for more than the mobile payments part)
Simple is an entire bank/debit card. Square Cash, Venmo, etc can all be set up on your existing debit card. I certainly hope I don't have to switch banks to do mobile payments.
Simple lover here, I agree, I love being able to Simple Instant money to friends but I agree with the reply to your comment about how it's a bank and not a payment service. While I will stay will Simple for the foreseeable future (AMAZING customer support, beautiful app and website, goals, and instant transfer) I am somewhat disappointed in Simple as a company. They came out saying they were going to be a full bank and have an API and all of that and then backtracked on a lot of it. They are just a layer over an existing bank (which limits them somewhat) and there is still no API to be seen.
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.
Simple has several significant limitations, namely, the need to mail checks over a certain threshold (I think $5k) and I don't know whether they do credit origination, either.
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.
I use Square cash sometimes and I think it's pretty good, I don't think I would use this. A Facebook account is already a target for hacking, let alone bringing payment info into the situation.
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.
"Oh wait, that's not my bank's ATM. I don't want to be charged a $4 fee. Oh well, I'll get you next time." ATM's are not a good solution. I don't want to pay $24 to give someone $20 because of ATM fees. Or wait in a long line (assuming you are at a busy location/area) to get the money.
I hear it's pretty common in the US. I guess it has to do with the question who operates the ATM. In Germany it exists too if you use an ATM from a bank that's not partnering with your bank (which is ~50% of all ATMs and straightforward to figure out).
It depends on a lot of things. Some banks charge to withdraw from other banks' accounts. Some banks join "networks" and don't charge for others in the same network. Some ATMs are set up inside stores, and they charge money that goes to the store instead of a bank.
Or - here's this "checkbook" thing I have sitting in my bag, I'll write you a $20 check, and you open up your banking app and deposit it immediately, and keep the paper check just for a receipt.
People walk around with checks? I cringe on the rare occasions I have to write one to the local water utility (they refuse to provide any recurring payment solution - I suspect because low margins, and they like the late payment fees).
"You owe me $20" "Ok, hold on, let me get into my car, drive down the street, look for parking, get out of my car, wait in line, pay an extra $1-4, drive back down the street, look for parking, exit car, then hand you your $20 that just cost me about $30 in time, effort and gas."
But maybe I'm cynical because I'm in Austin and driving anywhere is just miserable.
"The total for both of us was $55, so you owe me $27.5."
"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 ?"
"OK you say you owe me a beer from last week so here's a $20 and we're even"
"Oh you need the full $27.50 because your life will collapse due to a lack of $7.50 in cash although nobody uses cash, well, there's an ATM in the lobby thats free on my network, I'll spot you $30 on the $27.50 and you owe me a can of soda next time"
The problem with a bazzilion services all trying to extort small transactional fees either short term or long term is the marketing about their fee can't avoid mentioning that the fee is really small and we're discussing fairly small amounts of money.
There is absolutely no fee on Venmo/Square Cash/PayPal as long as you use debit card/bank account.
I am okay with rounding off amounts with my close friends. But with other people there is that social angle with being comfortable enough when I tell them I will buy you soda next time. Plus consider this "buying soda next time" with 10 people at the same time in either direction. The question is not about $2.50 being a small amount. I like being exact about money and so do lot of my friends. May be I am from a different background where $2.50 is still money that should be cleared.
He got 40€ out and paid 4€ in fees. Thats not uncommon in Germany, where different bank groups (eg Deutsche Bank, the Raiffeisen cooperative association and the Sparkasse) charge nothing for withdrawals but other bank customers get charged. Couple of years ago it was introduced that the fees had to be displayed prior to withdrawal but they're still high.
"$44 to get $40" => $4 in fees for using another bank's ATM. This is very much within the ballpark range for USA at least.
Sidenote: Usually such fees are O(1), i.e., independent of the actual amount being withdrawn (and even applies to non-monetary transactions, such as balance inquiry).
When you get used to something like Venmo, and a critical mass of friends are using it, it's amazing how effortless it is. Take a cab somewhere, one person pays with their credit card, the other people settle up in the next 30 seconds. Done.
It's the critical mass of friend's that key though. Hell, Paypal is just as effortless once that critical mass is hit, and that's has been around since 1998.
Paypal's UX has changed to be simpler, but I don't think they even had a mobile app for the longest time. It was also several inputs, such as choosing the type of transaction to make sure you don't get charged a fee for sending money to your friend.
I'm not going to go home and remember to paypal on my desktop when I could just use the venmo app to send you money right after you paid.
Depending on the arbitrary counting methodology you want to use you could easily say this is the same amount of steps. For your physical wallet you take wallet out, you get money, you swipe, you sign. For Facebook the first time you open a chat with your friend, you click button, get wallet out, you enter information, you enter amount, you send. The subsequent times it's you opening a chat with your friend, clicking the button, entering the amount, sending.
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'm assuming I would already be in a Facebook conversation with the person, so the number of steps would be relatively low. Without that assumption, Facebook is (mildly) more difficult than a physical wallet.
At least for my demographic in NYC it feels like Venmo has enough traction that there isn't much friction if you ask to be paid/pay with Venmo. Enough people have it that the odd one out who doesn't feels compelled to sign up, and the onboarding is also fast enough that people can sign up while waiting for the check at a restaurant, for example.
All that says is that Venmo has traction among your immediate peers. If Paypal/Square wallet/Bitcoin had the same traction, the rest of your comment would still be hold.
In fact this is just the second time I've heard about Venmo and I don't care remotely. My peer group is heavily PayPal based and therein lies the issue - fragmentation suddenly becomes painfully obvious when you try to pay someone you've not sent money to before or you go to a new store which has decided to use the new hotness which you've never even heard of.
Sure, but that was really my point: I was just offering a tiny data point on the progress towards the goal that the person I was replying to expressed:
> At this point, I just want one of these pay-with-your-phone solutions to win and be ubiquitous.
I'm not saying this is a clear winner, just that Venmo is well on its way to ubiquity in this market, at least within my demographic/peer group. I'm fairly social, and I try to keep an eye on the tech that people I meet who don't work in tech are using, and Venmo certainly stands out in that regard.
I didn't intend to make any claims about global market penetration. Just pointing out that it has notable tractiom in my market and peer group, and that because of that it had made strides towards the ideal bill-splitting situation outlined above: it is used widely enough that it's a clear default when splitting a bill with a mixed group. Maybe it won't catch on any more widely, but similar apps have been around for a while and never reached the adoption where multiple people in a group would suggest or accept them as payment. It's not actually available outside the US right now, which may be why you haven't heard of it, and which is clearly a big hurdle on the road towards true ubiquity.
I used Venmo for a while and it works well. Square Cash I've found is even better since it skips the unnecessary social part, doesn't hold funds (directly transfers to bank) and somehow people can sign up without having to do the mini deposit account verify dance with their bank.
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.
Well I knew that they used the refund rails, but I was curious how they protect against fraud. This seems to imply that there's nothing magical regarding the anti-fraud: they just try stay on top of it.
It comes out of your bank account, that sounds awful. In that they don't have the security requirements of banks, or the fraud protection of credit cards. So Venmo gets hacked, and everyone's (non-refundable) money gets transferred to Russia. Great.
I wonder what incentives these new players have to provide a medium to transfer money on their platform? Why should I give my credit card to Facebook or Snapchat?
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.
Do one thing. Do it well. vs Do everything. Do it OK.
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.)
Interesting. Facebook has over 1.1 billion users, but their existing financial systems (Facebook credits, etc) process only 1 million transactions a day. I would have thought it was higher. Of course, that's daily, so another way to look at it is 0.1% of Facebook users pay for something on Facebook on a given day, which strangely feels high.
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 wonder if there's potential for this to be a content-creator-payment platform? That is, make tipping a publication as easy as hitting a "Like" on any given story...you could even have it as an extra button (I think making it a default pop-up with every "Like" would be detrimental to the user experience, to the point that users would just stop hitting "Like" for stories they actually liked)...it wouldn't make much money for FB, perhaps, but it would create further adoption of the platform.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 475 ms ] threadYou 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.
[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/
I personally use SquareCash all the time, and also use PNC bank's complimentary POPmoney setup to transfer funds for free (with PNC, I scheduled a partial rent payment to go to my landlord's bank account automatically every paycheck).
But this totally tells us about how slow facebook is moving. They had 100x people, 100x money but still end up 2x slower.
On a side note - no AmEx or Bank Account option...
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 bet this number is much lower than you think it is. People outside of the tech/hacker scene don't care about privacy (in this context). "Who cares if Facebook knows that I went to McDonalds?"
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.
1: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dmarcus
2: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stanchudnovsky
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.
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.
Not sure if that's common or not, and i'm sure i'm in the minority, but nevertheless i figure it's a valid thought. To be clear, i'm not saying that they shouldn't be trusted, i'm saying that to a FB-ignorant person, i'm not too trusting of them.
Note: This has nothing to do with anti FB/"FB data" type of people.
Once you're signed up then FB have dropped the barrier to making further payments with their platform, which presumably is the purpose of this from their point of view.
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).
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.
* 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. "
-bitcoiner's fantasy.
"Confinity Inc. is best known as the creator of PayPal. It was founded in December 1998 by Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, and Luke Nosek, initially as a Palm Pilot payments and _cryptography_ company. Confinity launched its milestone product, PayPal in late 1999."
[0] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confinity
It had some cute name that I can't recall right now. Hugo or something? It was spun out into a separate company to use the same philosophy to fight terrorism. That company is Palantir and seems to be Thiel's opus magnum.
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.
Generally, they try to ensure that the liability shift is on the bank's side, by using an EMV capable system for most payments. Of course, that usually requires them to have a specific contract; banks, on their side, perform a risk assessment to ensure that they won't be covering too much fraud.
I could setup a site with a front-facing flower shop, accept orders, take in the peoples $$ legitimately, and then transact and fulfill their orders (via fraud) on 1800flowers.com for example.
I realize that anyone could do this for anything, but the weaker your weak points are, the easier it is to capitalize on them.
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.
Id rather use bitcoin.
Simple is just that. A bank (or rather, a banking services provider. Us bancorp is the actual bank).
The tight integration with mobile payments, because of them also being a banking services provider, is absolutely flawless.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATM_usage_fees
But maybe I'm cynical because I'm in Austin and driving anywhere is just miserable.
"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 ?"
"Oh you need the full $27.50 because your life will collapse due to a lack of $7.50 in cash although nobody uses cash, well, there's an ATM in the lobby thats free on my network, I'll spot you $30 on the $27.50 and you owe me a can of soda next time"
The problem with a bazzilion services all trying to extort small transactional fees either short term or long term is the marketing about their fee can't avoid mentioning that the fee is really small and we're discussing fairly small amounts of money.
I am okay with rounding off amounts with my close friends. But with other people there is that social angle with being comfortable enough when I tell them I will buy you soda next time. Plus consider this "buying soda next time" with 10 people at the same time in either direction. The question is not about $2.50 being a small amount. I like being exact about money and so do lot of my friends. May be I am from a different background where $2.50 is still money that should be cleared.
Sidenote: Usually such fees are O(1), i.e., independent of the actual amount being withdrawn (and even applies to non-monetary transactions, such as balance inquiry).
I'm not going to go home and remember to paypal on my desktop when I could just use the venmo app to send you money right after you paid.
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).
> At this point, I just want one of these pay-with-your-phone solutions to win and be ubiquitous.
I'm not saying this is a clear winner, just that Venmo is well on its way to ubiquity in this market, at least within my demographic/peer group. I'm fairly social, and I try to keep an eye on the tech that people I meet who don't work in tech are using, and Venmo certainly stands out in that regard.
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'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.
http://jonbwhite.tumblr.com/post/66853226398/how-square-move...
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.)
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%.
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/