Page 253 - The Digital Financial Services (DFS) Ecosystem

ITU-T Focus Group Digital Financial Services
Ecosystem

• announcing and managing events.

Several less well-known but commercially important activities include:

• person-to-person (P2P) payments;
• physical world payments;
• conversational commerce via chat.

2.2.1 P2P payments
Some social networks, such as Facebook and WeChat, provide P2P payment services. Besides enhancing the
social network’s overall value proposition to consumers, P2P payments grow the number of users with wallets.
As a result, users drawn to P2P payments can now buy from social network-affiliated merchants.

In March 2015, Facebook started allowing US-based Facebook Messenger users to pay each other via the
Messenger application (see screenshot below). To enable this feature, users link a debit card to their Messenger
account.

WeChat’s P2P service has been extremely successful due to cultural traditions and creative marketing tactics.
In 2014, WeChat China launched a P2P payment feature called Lucky Money (renamed Red Packets) based
on the ‘red envelope’ tradition of giving friends red paper envelopes with cash gifts for special occasions such
as weddings, births, graduations, and major holidays. This feature grew very rapidly. On the eve of the 2016
Chinese New Year, 420 million users made 8 billion P2P payments (55 per cent of the 762 million monthly
active users at that time). Two marketing tactics contributed to the rapid growth:
1
• Group feature: Users can send money to a group of friends but limit the number of winners, creating a
sense of urgency and generating ‘mindshare.’
• Money give-away: TV giveaways helped drive adoption. During widely viewed programs, users could
enter a free lottery by literally shaking their phones at the appropriate time. Winners received money
and discount coupons.
This P2P behaviour is no longer limited to holidays. Over 60 million WeChat users in China send Red Packets
each day. Money has become a form of social communication, similar to sending stickers or emoji to friends.
2

1 New Data Revealed – Spring Festival 2016 on WeChat. Feb 24, 2016. http:// blog. wechat. com/ 2016/ 02/ 24/ new- data- revealed-
spring- festival- 2016- on- wechat/ (accessed August 19, 2016). Monthly active users from Tencent Holdings’ financial statements
covering the quarter ending March 31, 2016.
2 Chan, Connie. Money as Message. How WeChat got users to adopt payments as a way to grow its network. July 24, 2016. http://
a16z. com/ 2016/ 07/ 24/ money- as- message (accessed August 19, 2016).

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