Join us Dec. 1-3 in New Orleans for the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit
If you live in the U.S., “social payments” is relegated to Venmo and its emoji-powered money transfers.
But compare that relatively thin offering to China’s WeChat, the do-everything messaging app that is the cornerstone of Chinese digital life. WeChat lets users execute peer-to-peer payments, top up their mobile phones, pay utility bills and book plane, train and movie tickets or book a karaoke session – to name just a few things. If China is any indication, social networks and messaging services could be killer apps for money transfer; WeChat is already leading that movement.
“WeChat is kind of a de facto operating system and has massive, massive usage,” said Sean Neville, cofounder and president of bitcoin wallet turned social payments app Circle. “There isn’t anything quite like that in the West.”
Just yet. But when WeChat, or a WeChat-like clone, finally hits the U.S., it’s going to look different. There’s more competition in the U.S., so there will probably be a few players as opposed to one “winner.” And although the U.S. payments system desperately needs an upgrade – sending payments is excruciatingly slow and expensive – it works well enough; how much U.S. customers benefit from paying in new ways with new technologies doesn’t yet outweigh trained behaviors that don’t want to change.
More in Marketing
Walmart, Target, Kroger swap name brands for private labels in Thanksgiving meal deals
Walmart’s website says its meal costs 25% less than the basket it offered last year, and that the turkey was at the lowest price since 2019.
Amid search wars, Google touts YouTube, display inventory to advertisers
Google is pushing Demand Gen and YouTube to ad partners, hedging against the inevitable erosion of its search business by AI chatbots.
Future of Marketing Briefing: The agentic turn inside programmatic advertising
The arrival of the Agentic RTB Framework this week lands as this week lands as the third agentic standard in under a month.