You Can Now Send A Payment To Anyone In The World Via iMessage

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In its quest to become a go-to app for global peer-to-peer payments, Circle is now, with the arrival of iOS 10, available on iMessage, giving iOS 10 users the ability to send U.S. dollars, euros, pound sterling and Bitcoin to anyone via Apple’s texting service.

By releasing an iMessage version of Circle (announced last week), the social payments provider is tapping into what is likely Apple’s most popular app, processing 200,000 iMessages a second.

“We want to make money work the way the internet works,” says Allaire, noting that while people talk about “cross-border” payments, no one would describe an email that way. “Crucially, [Circle for iMessage] works with the dominant way people interact — messaging.”

It also allows the company to capitalize on its vision for more activity in social payments, which have taken off in China through the WeChat app. Circle chief executive Jeremy Allaire, who previously founded a number of successful ventures including online video platform Brightcove, says that after WeChat opened itself up for third-party developers to build apps on top of it, Wechat saw explosive growth as it added business services, utilities, payments and other services offered by third-party apps. Now, he says Apple is doing something similar with iMessage.

“We had been, internally, for some time, evolving our infrastructure for the Circle service to support what we called an app-less experience, which meant we believe people should be able to make social payments and make and receive payments in a lot of different contexts, where they interact with a lot of people, not just within one monolithic app,” says Allaire. “So when Apple announced that they were opening up iMessage in iOS 10 [to third-party developers], it was perfect timing.”

read rest of the article here http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2016/09/13/you-can-now-send-a-payment-to-anyone-in-the-world-via-imessage/#61aca8c2685d