Posted on Apr 13, 2016 by Administrator

Today Snapchat unveiled a partnership with payment processor Square to launch payments inside the Snapchat app.

The feature, dubbed Snapcash, allows users to send money to friends on the network by simply typing the amount and hitting send. With Snapcash, we’re finally starting to get a glimpse of a promising future of mobile payments.

These types of frictionless payments aren’t exactly new. Square has allowed users to send money over email for some time now, while competitors like Venmo allow users to send payments with simply a mobile number. However, despite the choices before today, they’ve been going about it wrong.

Many of these payment companies have been focused on building out their own networks or messaging system in order to pay friends. Some of them have systems that are attached on top of social networks to send payments to others, but they still require the recipient to be registered on the payment service to actually receive the money.

Naturally, this barrier to entry along with the sheer amount of options in the payment space means that the act of actually getting money to a person is a total pain in the ass.