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| Twitter is working on a new electronic payment feature |
Twitter is working to offer payment services through its social media platform and has begun applying for the necessary regulatory licences, the Financial Times reported Monday, citing people familiar with the matter.
Esther Crawford, director of product management at Twitter, leads a small team developing the payment feature, according to the paper.
Enabling payments via Twitter is seen as an important part of Musk's plan to find new revenue streams, especially after ad revenue has fallen to around $5 billion annually.
Twitter used to get roughly 90% of its revenue from digital ad sales, but that's changed since Musk bought it for $44 billion in late October as he watched its ad campaigns tumble.
The advertisers pulled out primarily over concerns about Musk's moderation methods and concerns that their ads would appear alongside controversial content.
Musk has said in the past that he wants to enable Twitter to offer financial technology services such as peer-to-peer transactions, savings accounts and debit cards, as part of a grand plan to turn Twitter into a "universal app" that allows users to communicate, to pay and to carry out transactions. Similar to the Chinese WeChat app.
According to the newspaper, Musk co-founded x.com in 1999, one of the first online banks that later became part of electronic payments giant PayPal.
The Crawford team is currently developing a robust vault to store and protect collected user data, the Financial Times said, citing two people familiar with the matter. It also reported that Twitter has also begun to require some of the necessary authorizations to enable the feature.
It should be noted that even before Musk's acquisition of Twitter, the company had already started offering some payment features, such as b. Tips for Bitcoin and Ecommerce Content Creators.
But Musk's vision goes beyond those features, as the newspaper's sources say there will be more ways to reward creators directly, buy items directly from the platform, and allow users to pay each other.