MasterCard recently announced the launch of their new money transfer service, Send. Simply put MasterCard send allows any two parties to send and receive money. It seems similar to other mobile applications such as Square cash, Venmo, Paypal and even Facebook but the main difference seems to be that they also have a strong focus on business & government clients that do large disbursements (e.g rebates, refunds or insurance claims).
Their main selling point over traditional methods of sending money (ACH transfers & checks) seems to speed with funds being available for use within 30 minutes of being sent. Funds will be able to be received on MasterCard & non MasterCard debit cards, mobile wallets, bank accounts and cash agents.
To begin with MasterCard have launched with partners Berkshire Hathaway Travel Protection and FreeShipping.com, but other than that there really isn’t much information about the program. There are no fees listed and no way to sign up for the service.
It looks like to begin with they will be launching with consumers in the US that have a debit card, in this respect there really is no difference between them and their competition in Square/Venmo. I’m interested to see how this develops over time.
