"Relatively poor" is letting them off easy, comically incompetent would be closer to the truth. Hopefully Square doesn't trust data from Snapchat.

Lucky for Snapchat their users and potential investors don't care about security in the slightest.

I disagree. The primary users of Snapchat aren't worried about security.

They also aren't currently sending each other money. I hate to be a naysayer to what I think is a pretty cool product, but Snapchat's terrible security reputation is well-deserved. But also this isn't very much differentiated from sending money with Gmail, Square, etc.

I think the point is that they ARE sending eachother money, just in less efficient ways. Looking at how people use snapchat it isn't as much about ephemeral as it is about speed. It's much easier to send a picture to someone in snapchat as the flow is better, and it doesn't leave a stupid photo on your phone (and on several cloud backups) that you didn;t want to stick around forever (e.g. check out this awesome car, you don't need a copy of that)

I thought this move was awesome. In my 17-25 year old life my friends and I were constantly owing eachother money for random things. If someone could pay me back right there for no charge that would have been my dream. We debated building an app for it at one point, just to tally who owes who what. It was a big enough issue I carried an excel doc but not enough to go out and search a standalone app for it. If the function is easily integrated into an app I use for something similar, however, I feel like I may pick it up.

Also teenagers aren't using gmail or square, etc. now so if snapchat can take them over before university they have a better chance of winning, imo. I do believe this is a market to be won going forward, at least in that 17-25 demographic (also why bitcoin got me excited, no fees for small transactions is a REQUIREMENT for person to person payments).

> and it doesn't leave a stupid photo on your phone (and on several cloud backups) that you didn;t want to stick around forever (e.g. check out this awesome car, you don't need a copy of that)

You should probably research Snapchat's history and behaviors.

the OP's argument sounds more like one of convenience though -- I don't really care if there's a cached copy of my awesome car picture somewhere.. I just don't want to see it in my main photo app.

How are they able to transact with Visa and Mastercard without fees?

I assume any "no fees" clause means that they're not taking fees at this time. It doesn't mean "no fees anywhere in the system". So there very likely is a 3% fee to the user, just not from snapchat.

Even with their money?

Most of these users never used Paypal so if one of their friends tells them they can send money over Snapchat they probably won't think two seconds about it.

Seems like Venmo is on a spree to win secure payments in the developed world. It has a few horses in the race:

http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/04/dasher-teams-up-with-venmo-...

At least Dasher has a solid team behind it (former director of mobile at Gilt et al). Not sure how I feel about Snapchat given their security record.

s/developed world/USA/

Signed, Paym user

Even if the users of snapchat were particularly concerned with the security of this feature, they alleviated that concern in the post by stating that all of the financial security will be handled by Square which is building it's reputation of security in mobile payments.

I'd like to see a venn diagram of Snapchat users and people who actually know who/what Square is

I'd like to see a venn diagram of Snapchat users, people who actually know who Square are, and people who don't trust snapchat's security. I'm willing to bet that people who wouldn't trust snapchat would also know enough about security to have heard of, and (possibly) trust Square.

Fair, but even without the information of who/what Square is beforehand, you can look them up. I'd be more likely to trust them than Snapchat simply because they've been around and have multiple payment solutions out already. And even if you can't be motivated to do a few quick searches, you could likely make some assumptions that snapchat didn't pick up some random company off the street to handle their finances.

It's deserved. Gotta give it to them though, pretty bold move considering.

http://www.wired.com/2014/10/the-snappening-is-not-your-faul...

http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/12/27/snapchat-ignored-secu...

http://gibsonsec.org/snapchat/index.html

almost every major internet company has security issues nowadays. In my opinion, they should be judged on what the ultimate consequences to the users ended up being.

The issue is just, 99% of the people who use Snapchat, probably don't use facebook anymore.

Does Venmo actually have a better reputation for security than Square?