X Money’s Digital Payments Service is Unveiled; Platform Partners with Visa to Introduce P2P Payments.
X Money was announced on Tuesday by Elon Musk’s X, the microblogging network that was once called Twitter. The new digital wallet and payments service will allow users to send and receive money through a peer-to-peer (P2P) mechanism. Users will be able to transfer money from their bank account to a digital wallet, which they may subsequently transfer to another wallet on the site. X Money will collaborate with Visa, a US-based payments company, and the service is expected to compete with apps such as Cashapp, Venmo, and Zelle.
X Money will use Visa Direct for instant fund transfers, as stated by CEO Linda Yaccarino on Tuesday. Support for X Money accounts is expected “later this year”.
The company has collaborated with Visa, and users will be able to rapidly put dollars into their ‘X Wallet’ via Visa Direct, she noted. These monies can be used to make peer-to-peer payments using the service.
In addition to putting funds into the digital wallet, X Money will allow users to link their debit card to their account and make P2P payments on the platform, according to the CEO’s statement. P2P payments are currently enabled by a variety of US apps, including Cashapp and Venmo (or even Apple Pay Cash).
Users will also be able to transfer monies (probably from their X Wallet) to their bank accounts. The company has not announced when X Money would be available to users in the United States. Visa announced in a post that US-based X Money account holders will be able to make real-time transfers with a debit card.
One step closer to a ‘Everything App’.
After purchasing Twitter and rebranding it as X, Elon Musk made his intentions for the platform plain. The billionaire intends to make X a “everything app” inspired by Chinese apps such as WeChat, with support for payments, purchases, chat, and other features.
X has been working on introducing support for digital payments for a few years now. Musk informed Cathie Wood of ARK Invest in December 2023 that before X could begin operations as a money transmitter, it would need permission in the form of licenses from numerous US states.
According to a support document for the payment platform, X has licenses from 41 states, and X Payments LLC is registered as a Money Service Business (MSB) with the US Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN).
X Money could potentially compete with PayPal, the payment services company founded when Confinity combined with Elon Musk’s X.com bank in 2000. For nearly two decades, the billionaire has planned to build a payments platform, which could finally happen later this year with the debut of X Money.
