Snapchat Teams Up With Square to Offer Money-Transfer Feature

By Sarah Frier

Nov. 18 (Bloomberg) -- Snapchat is linking with mobile payments company Square to introduce a money-transfer feature. Bloomberg’s Caroline Hyde reports on “The Pulse.”

Snapchat Inc., developer of a mobile application for sending disappearing photos, is teaming up with payments company Square Inc. so that users can send cash to each other.
Snapchat, which recently received an investment from Yahoo! Inc. that values the startup at $10 billion, will make the new feature, called Snapcash, available for users who are 18 or older with a debit card, it said in a blog post yesterday.
The deal gives Square access to Snapchat’s users, who send more than 700 million disappearing “snaps” a day. Snapcash joins other apps such as Venmo in offering people a way to send and receive money quickly, such as when diners split a restaurant bill. This is Los Angeles-based Snapchat’s second potential revenue-generating product in addition to advertisements, which debuted last month.
The security of the debit-card numbers will be handled by San Francisco-based Square. Snapchat apologized in January for a security breach that led to data on 4.6 million users being exposed in 2013.