Twitter CEO Elon Musk is currently pushing ahead with his plans for Twitter to offer fintech services, as he seeks to incorporate a payments option on the platform.
This move is suggested to be connected to Musk’s statement after he neared a deal to buy Twitter, in which he disclosed via a Tweet that the platform would be an everything app. He tweeted, “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app”.
After he purchased the company, on November 2022, Musk revealed his vision for Twitter to enter the payments market during a live-streamed meeting with Twitter advertisers, hosted on Twitter spaces.
Musk hinted that in the future, users would be able to send money to others on the platform, extract their funds to authenticated bank accounts, and after, perhaps, be offered a high-yield money market account to encourage them to move their cash to Twitter.
Investors King understands that Twitter has already started the process of developing software and applying for regulatory licenses to add a payment component to the platform.
Sources familiar with Twitter’s plan disclosed that the platform has started applying for state licenses after filing to be a payments processor with the U.S. treasury in November.
Few analysts suggest that Musk’s plan to incorporate the payments option on Twitter could be him making a move to restore lost revenue after advertisers on the platform paused their ads over concerns regarding content moderation and free speech policy.
Musk plan to push Twitter into the online payment space could pose a threat to online payment giant Paypal.
Meanwhile, the financial times noted that if eventually Twitter becomes a payments processor, it would face stiff competition from existing apps within that sphere, also noting that it could also expect to contend with high levels of regulatory scrutiny, potentially presenting another level of difficulty for the company.