• by Colin Kirkland , July 7, 2023

With stark competition building with the launch of Meta’s new Threads app, it’s not a bad time for Twitter to introduce new user capabilities.

With plans to expand into digital payments and other financial services, Twitter’s parent company X Corp secured its first licenses to enable funds transfers in the app.

Money transmitter licenses differ from state to state, but they more or less allow companies to send, receive, and transfer funds among users, nationally and internationally, as well as facilitating currency exchanges and issuing prepaid cards.

Twitter can now legally act as a money transmitter in New Hampshire, Michigan, and Missouri, marking the first step toward facilitating direct payments in what owner Elon Musk sees becoming an “everything app.”

Musk has a history in digital payments. In 1999, Musk launched his first online banking start-up called X.com, which eventually became PayPal. According to recent statements from Musk and the new Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino, “X” may be coming back to replace the name "Twitter."

In April, Musk officially merged Twitter with his X Holdings Corp, which he said would be the eventual holding company of his various businesses, including Neuralink, SpaceX, Tesla, and the Boring Company.

The future of X is largely based on China’s popular WeChat app, which billions of users in China use to complete essential tasks, like paying their bills and grocery shopping, as well as texting, broadcast messaging, video conferencing, playing video games, following the news and more.

“Think of it like WeChat in China, which is great now, but there's no WeChat equivalent outside of China,” Musk said in response to a question about why he wanted to buy Twitter in the first place. “There's a real opportunity to create that.”

Funds transferring capability is still an early, yet notable, step for Twitter’s potential “everything app” transformation.

Twitter would not be the first social media platform to attempt WeChat status. In 2016, Meta introduced a series of features to its Messenger app that effectively tried for the same goal. However, its “Western WeChat” wasn’t successful, mostly due to user feedback, which showed that making payments, playing games and more wasn’t a desired use case for the messaging app.