It seems Visa will soon make it very easy to pay people on Facebook.
Earlier this week Visa Europe announced a partnership with Singapore-based Fastacash, a social payments service. Most of the announcement focused on the rebranding of Visa Europe’s peer-to-peer payment service from Visa Personal Payments to Visa Direct, but more interesting is the partnership with Fastacash.
Fastacash launched in 2012 — Bank Innovation saw it live at Money2020 — with the idea of sending money (and other items such as photos or documents) quickly and inexpensively between countries via social media channels, including messaging apps. This includes, of course, Facebook, whose payments travails have been well documented, as well as Skype, Whatsapp, Twitter, and the like. Fastacash CEO Vince Tallent called the service “truly agnostic” as to platform at the time of its launch.
For now the deal does not extend to Visa customers outside of Europe.
Fastacash works by sending links containing money and other data, such as a note or picture, across social platforms. Those links lead to the Fastacash service, which can be be white-labeled, and where the money can be retrieved.
Interestingly, Fastacash works through Facebook’s messaging service, which now means Facebook Messenger, headed by former PayPal CEO David Marcus.
Visa also announced a series of partnerships yesterday with global banks, including US Bank and BBVA, to power mobile payments. The service will mean Visa will power bank-branded apps for payments at the point of sale.It has been speculated that Visa Direct and other mobile efforts in Europe, relying as they do on tokenization and NFC, could pave the way for APple Pay in Europe and the UK .
Fastacash has $8.5 million in total funding, according to Crunchbase.
Learn more about mobile banking and social payments next week at Bank Innovation 2015 in Seattle. Request your invitation here.