Banking Review

Facebook sets sights on payments, while banks debate M@MBO

The business of payments is something Facebook is “focusing a lot of time on” revealed Facebook’s Australian head Paul Borrud yesterday, speaking at an Interactive Minds event on Facebook for business.

Facebook recently announced a partnership with PayPal to allow advertisers to use PayPal when purchasing Facebook ads. PayPal has also been made available for users buying virtual items in games and applications on Facebook.

Borrud says the partnership will help Facebook leverage PayPal’s user base (153 million accounts), and make the payments process easier for users and advertisers.

But “It doesn’t mean that were not going to continue to find ways to improve payments with them or by ourselves in the future for ticketing or commerce”.

Borrud says companies in the US like 1800 Flowers are already enabling customers to buy product within the Facebook environment. “You’re going to see more and more businesses doing that.”

Facebook is also rumoured to be working on a ticketing offering. Rae Bassett, audience development manager with the Queensland Performing Arts Centre, which owns the qtix ticketing brand, says offering tickets through the Facebook platform would deliver a lot of benefits.

“Most of it is about facilitating the social platform, so if I want to go see something then I tell my friends and ask them if they want to go see it.” Bassett would like to enable users to invite friends and enable payment in one place, something a peer-to-peer payments offering could deliver.

Meanwhile, Australian bankers considering launching a peer-to-peer payments offering of their own have been distracted by the BPAY-driven M@MBO project, which after being shelved for more than 12 months, is back in development.

Industry sources say bank staff are now being pulled from other projects to work on M@MBO, which would see individuals register for their own BPAY code to facilitate payments. Consumers could then port their number from bank to bank without the need to re-establish direct debits or credits, and use it to enable online payments.

M@MBO’s ability to streamline peer-to-peer payments has taken a blow however, after a key element of the original project that would have seen M@MBO numbers linked to an alias such as a mobile phone number or email address, was vetoed by one of the banks involved in the project.

The industry’s ability to compete with companies like Facebook and PayPal can only be strengthened through co-operation. Unfortunately the group seems able to move only as quickly as the slowest innovator within it.