Twitter begins applying for regulatory licenses to enter US payments business.

As a new stream of revenue, Twitter is working on introducing an in-app payments system.
Source: Unsplash

Twitter, the social media platform acquired by Elon Musk in 2022, has begun the process of obtaining a regulatory license, necessary for becoming a payments business in the US. Twitter’s engineers are reportedly already working on the design of an in-platform payments software.

Musk has been hyper-focused on filtering the platform and implementing new revenue streams ever since acquisition, for which he paid a hefty $44 billion.

The introduction of payments into the platform’s infrastructure seems to be the primary contender for Musk’s next attempt to increase Twitter’s revenue. Previously, the investor has attempted to raise funds by making Twitter’s blue checkmark — a badge verifying authenticity of an account, previously offered to profiles of public interest for free — available as a $20 subscription. The experiment ended in chaos as users took the opportunity to make scandalous tweets from fake accounts of companies and celebrities using the new verification subscription.

Incorporation of a payments system into the Twitter architecture is a crucial aspect of Musk’s overarching vision for fresh revenue streams across the platform. Following the acquisition and Twitter’s subsequent chaos, the platform’s advertising business also faltered.

Financial services, such as peer-to-peer transactions, savings accounts, and even debit cards, are all part of the grandiose yet confusing vision, wherein Musk imagines Twitter as an “everything app” for users.

Twitter’s engineers are tasked with crafting a seriously-secure infrastructure, to protect data collected during payments. Subsequently, the platform has numerous state licenses it needs to acquire prior to launching. Twitter has already registered with the US Treasury as a payment processor, meaning that Musk might be entering a more familiar territory of operation.