Handling small transfers between in-dividuals is not an especially big or lu-crative part of the financial system, but it is a faddish one. On November 17th Snap-chat, a popular app that lets users send each other photos that disappear after a few seconds, introduced a new service called Snapcash that allows them to transfer money (with luck, no vanishing is in-volved). The news comes hot on the heels of the announcement from Groupe bpce, a French bank, that its customers will soon be able to send each other money via Twitter, a microblogging service. Facebook, a social network, has similar plans; Apple, which recently launched a payment service, may also join the fray.
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