Social networking sites are slowly emerging as  mini-banks for users! 

While private sector lender Kotak Mahindra Bank (KMB) has launched a Facebook-based instant fund transfer service in India, French banking major Groupe BPCE is teaming up with Twitter to allow its customers to transfer money via tweets.

KMB’s service will enable users to send money to friends on the social media network real-time, absolutely free!.

“This is a bank agnostic product, the sender and the receiver may not be our account holders. We have used the IMPS (immediate payment service) platform on the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) network to make this possible,” said Deepak Sharma, executive vice-president and head of digital initiatives, Kotak Mahindra Bank.

The IMPS platform has 28 banks under its fold and account holders of any of these lenders can use the newly-launched service, Sharma said.

The sender will have to register on a dedicated website for the initiative called “KayPay”, wherein he will have to give bank account details and the bank’s MMID (mobile money identification number), apart from personal credentials, Sharma said.

Once registered, the sender can initiate transactions.

He claimed it is fully secure, even in the event of the Facebook account getting compromised as it uses two-factor authentication to complete a transaction. Additionally, there is also an expiry time for a transaction.

At present, some lenders such as ICICI Bank allow fund transfers for their own account holders using Facebook. (Hindustan Times)