Nicolas Chatillon CEO of S-Money At The Announcement Of The New Division From French Bank BPCE

Reuters reports that one of France’s largest banks, Groupe BPCE, has teamed up with Twitter, Inc. to offer mobile money transfers via tweets. This service will be open to French residents, whether they are customers of the bank or not. The simple person-to-person money transfers service could be launched as early as this week. S-Money is a payment division of Groupe BPCE. Once the service launches it will be a closely watched experiment.

“(S-Money) offers Twitter users in France a new way to send each other money, irrespective of their bank and without having to enter the beneficiary’s bank details, with a simple tweet.” said Nicolas Chatillon, chief executive of S-Money, BPCE’s mobile payments unit, in a statement last month.

It is unclear when the payment service will be available for U.S. consumers.

Seemingly overnight, mobile payments has become the in-thing in Silicon Valley, with Twitter, Facebook and Apple all working towards launching their payment services and getting a foothold in the industry. However, it won’t be without competition from Google, PayPal and leading credit card companies.

Last month Twitter started trials of its own payment service dubbed ‘Twitter Buy’. The service will allow consumers to find and buy products direct from Twitter feeds from various partners like Burberry and Home Depot.

According to a leaked Walgreens internal memo, Apple’s offering for the mobile payment service industry, Apple Pay, could be launched as early as 18 October.

Twitter’s shares have dropped about 17 percent this year due to investors’ concern over the slow user growth. A marketing strategy analyst from Forrester Research, Thomas Husson, said, “Twitter wants to more explicitly demonstrate the overall value of its network as an advertising platform.”

Twitter is therefore likely to explore new ways to generate revenue with banks and credit card firms.