The social media company of Elon Musk, X, said on Tuesday that it collaborated with Visa to offer financial services, in one step in the direction of Mr. Musk's plans to extend it to an 'all -app'.
The new financial function, called X Money Account, will enable peer-to-peer payments from users debt cards and enable users to transfer funds to their bank accounts, said Linda Yaccarino, CEO of X, in a message. The service will be available later this year, she said.
“First of all of many major announcements about X money this year,” Mrs Yaccarino added.
Mr. Musk made financial services part of his pitch for X when he previously bought the company as Twitter in 2022 and promised to turn it into an app for payments, row-hailing services and more. But the progress when adding a bank component to the app has been slow, partly because X licenses of each state needs to transfer money in addition to other approvals of the regulations.
With the Visa deal, X can skip that step and transfer money to the Visa network instead of obtaining its own licenses.
A spokespersons for X did not immediately respond to a request for comments.
“Visa Direct will make it possible for us X Money Account users to finance money in real time and transfer it with their payment card,” said a Visa spokesperson in a statement.
Mr. Musk has experience with financial apps. He helped start the online bank that later became PayPal.
X earns most of its income from advertisements. But the billionaire, who also runs Tesla and SpaceX, has long promoted plans to make X more independent of advertising by transforming it further than social media – just like WeChat, a popular app in China.
In a pitch -deck in 2022 in bankers who finances his takeover of Twitter, Mr. Musk said that the social media app would deliver $ 15 million from a payment company by 2023. That things would grow to around $ 1.3 billion in 2028.
Ad -Dollars, who issued more than 90 percent of X's income at the time of the acquisition, would be replaced by subscription companies and reimbursement of the payment activities, said Mr. Musk's pitch.
But most of those plans have not yet been realized and the platform is still highly dependent on advertisements.
Mr. Musk sometimes gave rise to the play of advertisers, also at the end of 2023 when he used a rough word for those who had withdrawn back to the platform because of his actions on the app.
Stacy Cowley contributed reporting.
