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Introducing Snapcash

blog.snapchat.com

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Re: Introducing Snapcash

#171

Post by dsjoerg »

jpmattia wrote: post #166
aragot wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so the customers are paying. Yeah. Kindof. NAB has the debit card account free of charge, unlimited ATM withdrawals, transfers across banks free and attractive savings rates. CBA's fee is $5/mo unless you get a salary per month through your account. Pretty much the same for the 4 major banks. In France you need to pay 60-120€/year for an account + CC. In Australia you don't need to pay. In US don't they beg you to…

> In US don't they beg you to open a credit card? Yeah, pretty much. If you are responsible, you get back 1% of all of your purchases on the CC. And in the spirit of "who pays for that", it's the folks carrying a balance who pay for the 1% cash back on everything.

Another group of folks who pay for the 1% cash back are the merchants who pay fees well over 1% for transaction processing. http://www.cardfellow.com/blog/credit-card-processing-fees/

Re: Introducing Snapcash

#172

Post by toomuchtodo »

aragot wrote: post #161
jpmattia wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the competition drove the price per transaction to zero. So the customers are paying. The banks just build it into the banking fees. It's not like that infrastructure is free.

> so the customers are paying. Yeah. Kindof. NAB has the debit card account free of charge, unlimited ATM withdrawals, transfers across banks free and attractive savings rates. CBA's fee is $5/mo unless you get a salary per month through your account. Pretty much the same for the 4 major banks. In France you need to pay 60-120€/year for an account + CC. In Australia you don't need to pay. In US don't they beg you to…

Can you get an account in NZ as a US citizen without residing there?

Re: Introducing Snapcash

#173

Post by michaelochurch »

It was dark at 5:30. April 1 can be cold but not dark at 5:30. Something is amiss... Has the earth's axis shifted?

For a serious response, this deserves to fail. To do anything with payments requires being careful. Snapchat is not careful, and even in ridiculous bubble times, no one is claiming otherwise. If you even trust Evan Spiegel with a bag of rock salt, you're a damnable fool.

That horrid video, by the way, is just another thing that's going to be used when people ask "What the fuck were they thinking?" about Tech Bubble 2.0. I just hope that these jokers don't take a bunch of legitimate startups down with them. It makes me angry to see these asswipes getting so much press, because for every Evan Spiegel there are 10 people with genuine ideas who struggle to get funding after these jokers let their investors down.

Also, if you use "Snapcash" as a verb I will fucking cut you.

Re: Introducing Snapcash

#174

Post by kxo »

habosa wrote: post #124

Unless they have changed something under the hood I would NOT trust this service due to the insecure nature of the Snapchat API. There are many 3rd-party API clients for Snapchat that can access all parts of the API (send message, send picture, get picture, etc.). I even wrote one for Java. They are easily accessed from a console with a username/password combo. Considering how many password dumps are out there, it's…

How do you propose Snapchat, a company primarily producing a mobile application, prevent usage of its API?

You act like someone can't (with your username and password) (automatically or otherwise) scrupulously transact on your behalf with PayPal.

If you have the username/password - in a non-MFA system - you have access to everything.

Re: Introducing Snapcash

#175

Post by vishnugupta »

jordanthoms wrote: post #112

Meanwhile, everybody outside the US is trying to figure out how it's taken so long for easy person-to-person payments to happen there. Here in NZ, you've been able to pay directly to someone's bank account number for free for as long as I can remember, and my bank introduced payments to mobile numbers, facebook accounts, and email addresses 3 years ago. (Oh and it's totally safe to broadcast your account number to ev…

> Oh and it's totally safe to broadcast your account number to everyone, most companies have it listed on their website. No way to pull money from it through ACH without their permission

Totally second this; I'm from India. It's bit scary to know that in US "account number + routing number" is sort of secret key to the account, this is from my limited knowledge of course, but I don't think I'm far off.

And yes, account to account transfer has been around here for ages; though they were bit late to get it right now we have a whole range of options; pay to debit card, IMPS and what not.

Sometimes I wonder if banking in the so called third-world countries are is evolved than in the US, I could be wrong though.

Re: Introducing Snapcash

#176

Post by adam419 »

derwiki wrote: post #33
josephpmay wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are already using Venmo. Nobody is going to switch to Snapcash or Clinkle.

But Venmo hasn't won. Outside the Valley, I don't know anyone who uses it. (although, mostly the same with SquareCash)

Here in Seattle many people use it, and I know of people who use it in Chicago

Re: Introducing Snapcash

#177

Post by sahara »

This may be the first big move towards "Snapchat as America's Tencent"[0], and although there are red flags all over the place and that video (especially the software-eats-making-it-rain bit) is absurd, I get the feeling this might actually work.

[0] http://www.businessinsider.com/andreessen-snapchat-2014-1

Re: Introducing Snapcash

#178

Post by skizm »

cylinder wrote: post #98
skizm wrote: post #96

As much as I like competition, I hate entering my bank info into a lot of different places. I've been successfully ignoring venmo (in favor of paypal) for a while for the sole reason I don't want my info on more sites than necessary. Seems like a lot of companies are trying to solve the "I hate entering my bank info into a lot of different places" problem, but it is only making the problem worse when half of my frien…

fwiw paypal owns venmo.

Oh really? did not know that. Can I link accounts?

Re: Introducing Snapcash

#179

Post by rtpg »

jpmattia wrote: post #155
Negitivefrags wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The merchant has to buy (or rent) an EFTPOS terminal. The bank also charges the merchant a setup fee to connect your terminal to your bank account. Once that has been done there are no more fees. You have to look at the way it evolved. Because this is a service offered to customers by each bank in competition with each other, the competition drove the price per transaction to zero.

> the competition drove the price per transaction to zero. So the customers are paying. The banks just build it into the banking fees. It's not like that infrastructure is free.

I get what you're saying, but not everything costs money. For example, SMS piggybacked on infrastructure that already exists, so they are pretty much free to run (despite what your phone bill might say).

Similarly, this payment infrastructure could be a similar thing (maybe it opened up channels used for other mechanisms already?)

Re: Introducing Snapcash

#180

Post by mgkimsal »

jpmattia wrote: post #166
aragot wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so the customers are paying. Yeah. Kindof. NAB has the debit card account free of charge, unlimited ATM withdrawals, transfers across banks free and attractive savings rates. CBA's fee is $5/mo unless you get a salary per month through your account. Pretty much the same for the 4 major banks. In France you need to pay 60-120€/year for an account + CC. In Australia you don't need to pay. In US don't they beg you to…

> In US don't they beg you to open a credit card? Yeah, pretty much. If you are responsible, you get back 1% of all of your purchases on the CC. And in the spirit of "who pays for that", it's the folks carrying a balance who pay for the 1% cash back on everything.

it's not the people carrying a balance that pay for that - it's the merchants. it's an extra fee added on to the credit card fee that a merchant can't predict nor can they avoid.

As a merchant, I charged people, say... $10 for something. The fee might be 2.9%, but if it was 'rewards card' (which I can't tell ahead of time) the charge would show up as 4%.

The cost is passed on to every in the form of higher prices. The people carrying a balance have nothing to do with this. That would simply eat in to the banks' profits. Why would they just randomly give people x% of the profits from balance-accrued interest?

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