ASB's Russell Jones says enabling Twitter payments wouldn't be hard technically, but there's no business value in doing it

By Gareth Vaughan

ASB has considered letting customers make payments via online social network Twitter, but so far doesn't see a major issue that Twitter payments would address, says Russell Jones, ‎the bank's executive general manager for technology and innovation.

French bank Groupe BPCE this month enabled Twitter users to publicly repay debts, donate to charity or contribute to a gift purchase with a new payment service named S-Money. The service is, however, only for people with French bank cards and mobile phone numbers. Transactions are limited to €250 (about NZ$401) when paying a Twitter user, and €500 when sending money to charities or crowd-funding. (Here's a Groupe BPCE press release on the initiative).

Jones told interest.co.nz ASB had recently undertaken a high level assessment of Twitter payments, but at this stage can't see a major issue Twitter payments addresses. The assessment concluded that ASB would monitor Twitter payments.

"Technically we know exactly how to do it because it's consistent with some of the API (Application Programming Interface) stuff that we're doing, plus the way we've done stuff with Facebook (payments), which incidentally is changing from June next year because of a change Facebook has made around the way that they allow people to do things. So we're going to have to work on that anyway," Jones said.

"We're just not sure yet we see the business value of people making payments publicly which is what it (Twitter payments) would be."

That said, an area such as charitable donations was one way Twitter payments could potentially be used, Jones said.

"The initial assessment we did last week was it (Twitter payments) was technically not at all complicated, (but) doubtful there would be a wide user case based on the work we've done at the moment, and that we'd monitor it."

ASB has let customers make payments to Facebook friends since July 2012 and is the only New Zealand bank to have done this. Customers can make payments via Facebook worth up to $500 per day.

Fiona Colgan, ASB's general manager of digital, said via a spokeswoman information on how many customers make Facebook payments, and the total value of Facebook payments ASB has seen, is commercially sensitive.

“Facebook payments are a niche payment option and are not as widely used as our other mobile payment channels such as payments using mobile numbers," Colgan said.

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