Snapchat gets in to the money transfer market with Snapcash

Snapchat has become one of the most popular mobile apps in the world by allowing users to share pictures and videos with each other for seconds at a time, but according to Tech Crunch, the company has partnered up with Square to create Snapcash, a new payment feature that allows to link Visa or MasterCard debit cards to their accounts and share cash.

All of the account details will be held by Square Cash, which means that Snapchat won’t have any user payment information, according to Re/code, which is definitely a good thing when you consider the security breaches that the photo-sharing app has suffered in the past, such as the 200,000 Snapchat accounts that hackers managed to access back in October.

The feature was announced with an elaborate musical video that was sent to all Snapchat users. In order to utilize the new feature and send money to friends, users need only type a dollar sign and the amount that they want to send in what looks like a text, according to The Wall Street Journal, which the app will automatically recognize and will then send the payment.

Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel claims that this partnership isn’t meant to compete with services such as PayPal or Venmo. This is part of Snapchat’s ongoing attempt to begin monetizing itself, as the company collects a small transaction fee for each payment. The company is also working on bringing advertising and promotions to the app.