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.
No way to sign up and no mention of fee structure……..bad marketing…….don’t waste your PR budget until you are ready to play it seems to me……….
I don’t think they really wasted much marketing budget, seems to be they just sent out a regular press release which isn’t expensive at all.
I’ve been trying to get @AskMastercard to give me a sign up link, but they are of no help. it seems like it works only if Berkshire and FreeShipping is sending you money.
Yup, that’s the only way to sign up for now. I’m sure they’ll expand soon though.
I would love to know if this would work for sending money abroad.
That’s one of their stated aims to make it easier to send money overseas, especially to countries with lots of unbanked consumers.
The $64 MM question is: Will vgc work on this system? And what are the fees?
The real question is whether there will be cash advance fees.
I don’t think that will happen because it doesn’t seem that credit cards will be accepted.
Looks to be only Debit cards to begin with. Don’t really see the advantage over other payment methods but if they can grab that disbursement market they might be able to gain marketshare.