Twitter, under the reign of new CEO Elon Musk, has filed paperwork to become a financial service.
The US Treasury received the paperwork last Friday which outlines Musk’s plans to reinvent Twitter as a multi-dimensional app, as opposed to just simply a social media platform.
Musk took to Twitter Spaces on Monday with advertisers to confirm his plans to introduce payment functions and services within the app. The CEO is no stranger to the payment technology industry having co-founded PayPal, the successor to the online bank X.com.
During the Spaces session, Musk outlined that he aims to integrate ‘high-yield’ money market accounts and peer-to-peer transactions, as well as implementing a system in place to facilitate debit card transactions.
Musk’s grand vision for the social media platform is to form Twitter into an “everything app”, which will allow users to experience a variety of features, from ordering taxis and food, to video and audio chat rooms, Musk revealed during the Spaces.
During his short tenure as Twitter CEO so far following the $44bn purchase of the social media platform several weeks ago, Musk has also introduced ‘Twitter Blue’, a monthly subscription-based model that allows users to correctly verify themselves on the app with a ‘grey official tick’ marker underneath the pre-existing ‘blue tick’.
This $8-a-month service, which comes with additional features, will also help facilitate Twitter’s plans for payment integration, with Musk revealing that “now we can say you’ve got a balance on your account (Twitter Blue). Do you want to send money to someone else within Twitter? And maybe we pre-populate the account”.
Musk continued: “Then the next step would be to offer an extremely compelling money market account to get an extremely high-yield balance, and then add debit cards, cheques, etc.”
