Last Friday, the state of Arizona joined Michigan, Missouri and New Hampshire in granting a money transmitter license to Twitter subsidiary Twitter Payments LLC, according to the Nationwide Multistate Licensing System (NMLS). 

“I can verify that we did issue a money transmitter license to Twitter Payments LLC,” said James McGuffin, an assistant director for the Arizona Department of Insurance and Financial Institutions, during a Monday interview.

Getting those licenses is an important step in letting Twitter users send and receive money, a goal expressed by owner and CTO Elon Musk, who acquired the company last October. 

Musk has pitched investors on a goal of Twitter earning $1.3 billion in payment revenue by 2028, according to the Financial Times.

Twitter is seeking new ways to make money. Musk, a billionaire who also leads car-maker Tesla and space exploration company SpaceX, completed a purchase of the social media company last October. This year, the company’s advertising revenue has plunged, according to a report from The New York Times. Part of Musk’s solution was to start work on setting up a payments feature.

The pressure is mounting. Last week a rival app called Threads was launched by Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta. Threads broke records when it signed up over 100 million users in under five days, close to half of Twitter’s daily active user count, according to Reuters. 

San Francisco-based Twitter has applied for money transmitter licenses in every U.S. state and territory, according to a filing with the Department of the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.

Despite seeking those licenses nationwide, Twitter will still need to compete with a host of other payments tools already in existence, including the peer-to-peer payment app Venmo and the bank payment app Zelle.

Musk had tapped Twitter product manager Esther Crawford to serve as CEO of the Twitter Payments unit and to spearhead development of the new feature. She was cut earlier this year, according to news reports in February.

Twitter’s press email account responded with “????” when asked for comment.

By James Pothen on July 12, 2023
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