“Facebook’s decision to discontinue its peer-to-peer (P2P) Messenger payments option in the UK and France next month is due to poor adoption of the service by consumers, according to new figures from data analytics company GlobalData . It was revealed in April that Facebook was scrapping the service – which enabled users to exchange money with friends and family – on 15 June. The company said at the time that it was switching its focus to other payment concepts. GlobalData cites poor take-up by consumers for the abandonment of Messenger payments, despite major UK banks embracing it at its launch in 2017.”

“Facebook is pulling away from its ambitions to provide peer-to-peer money transfers via Messenger in Europe. Today, the company announced that it would be discontinuing the service — which let individuals send money to each other — in the two countries in the region where it had rolled it out, the UK and France on June 15 of this year. It appears that for now, the service will remain active in the US, where Facebook holds a number of money transmitter licenses .”

“Payment etiquette has always been shaped by two driving forces: the aversions to seeming cheap and to getting ripped off. The avoidance of both used to be as simple as giving someone cash the next time you saw them, or in giving the waiter multiple credit cards and dividing the bill. But in simplifying the transfer of funds, payment apps have added layers to both sides of the equation and ballooned the number of opportunities for missteps.”

“The app has annual revenue of more than $200 million, Schulman said. But that’s not quite enough for Venmo to make money. Investors will have to wait until at least mid-2019 for Venmo to be in the black, the company’s chief financial officer said. “The next phase for us is to get Venmo to break even. And that’s not something that’s going to happen in the next quarter or two, but there’s line of sight to that with what we’re doing,” PayPal CFO John Rainey said on the call.”

“French startup Lydia announced a partnership with Banque Casino today for small credit lines. Starting tomorrow, Lydia users in France will be able to borrow as much as €1,000 in just a few seconds. While Lydia started as a peer-to-peer money transferring app, fintech startups always end up offering credit at some point. It’s hard to make money without offering some form of credit.”

“Gift transactions rose 47.2% in December 2017 over the monthly average for the previous August through October, according to numbers released this week by Fiserv Inc. for its Popmoney P2P service. The increase in November last year over the same baseline was 9.6%. The Brookfield, Wis.-based company, which also processes for the Zelle P2P network, did not track similar numbers for Zelle since the service had only started up a few months earlier…Further evidence of the trend comes from a recent Zelle survey, which indicated almost half of respondents planned to give money this season, while 58% said they preferred to receive money.”

“Until recently, traditional banks were slow to adopt real-time payment options pioneered by fintech companies like PayPal, Square, and Venmo. However, with the mobile payment sector growing at more than 50% a year, it was only a matter of time before banks entered the fray.”

“Early Warning Services, LLC, the network operator behind Zelle, today released the results of its Holiday Survey. Scrooges and humbugs beware: the national survey found that nearly 50% of those surveyed plan to give money this holiday season, while the majority (58%) prefer to receive money as a gift. With Zelle, you can send and receive money with people you know and trust – right from your banking app.”

“In the hotly contested market for person-to-person transactions, PayPal Holdings Inc.’s Venmo unit has rarely made a misstep. But over the weekend the popular service said it will raise its fee from 25 cents to 1% for so-called instant transfers users make to move money from their Venmo account to a bank account, with a 25-cent minimum.”

“Fiserv, Inc. (NASDAQ: FISV), a leading global provider of financial services technology solutions, today announced that a growing number of financial institutions are enhancing their person-to-person (P2P) payment capabilities by joining the Zelle Network^® via Fiserv. Bank of the West, Comerica Bank, Dollar Bank, Navy Federal Credit Union, and Zions Bancorporation, N.A. are among the most recent to go live on Turnkey Service for Zelle^® from Fiserv to facilitate an efficient connection to the network. In total, more than 100 banks and credit unions have selected Fiserv to enable Zelle and are currently live or will be going live in the future.”

“In light of the quick rise of P2P—and its potential financial and privacy risks—Consumer Reports tested five mobile P2P services to see how they stacked up for user protections. In our first-ever test-based ratings of P2P mobile services, CR rated Apple Pay the highest overall, with excellent or very good marks in the key consumer-protection measures of payment authentication and data privacy. Apple’s overall rating was significantly higher than for the other services we tested: Venmo, Square’s Cash App, Facebook P2P Payments in Messenger, and Zelle.”

“Snapcash may have become more of a liability than a utility. With apps like Venmo, PayPal, Zelle, and Square Cash itself, there were plenty of other ways to pay back friends for drinks or Ubers, so Snapcash may have seen low legitimate usage. Meanwhile, a quick Twitter search for “Snapcash”surfaced plenty of offers of erotic content in exchange for payments through the feature. It may have been safer for Snapchat to ditch Snapcash than risk PR problems over its misuse.”