A payment is just small part of a business transaction. For your business to be successful, the payment has to be a ‘frictionless’, no hassle part of the whole transaction. Billions of consumers use social networks - Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp and Wechat as well as traditional text messages - as an everyday part of their daily lives, so it is not surprising that fastacash wondered, “If I can send you a photo through WhatsApp, why can’t I share money with you too?” The question inspired their business which was incorporated in 2012 and went live with their first partner, DOKU Wallet, in October 2013.

fastacash platform and coverage

The fastalink technology ensures that payments made and shared across the platform reaches the intended recipient. The technology uses encryption with multiple layers of security, which can be added or removed depending on user’s requirements.

fastacash have focused their platform on P2P (Person2Person) payments and P2M (Person2Merchant) payments. They partner with local banks, payment service providers, money transfer operators, wallet service companies, mobile operators, retailers and social & messaging platforms to provide payment services on all the major social networks to ensure world-wide coverage, see figure:

Source & Copyright©2016 - fastacash

New partners are coming onto the platform, one of the most recent is Xpress Money with their XoPo app in the UK which is available on the Android and iOS platforms through which they offer full omnichannel payment service on all the major social networks. The partners all use the same platform infrastructure, packaging and branding it to suit their marketing and positioning

P2P payment services

The basic fastacash platform solution is shown by the dashboard, figure below, in AXIS BANK’s ‘PING PAY’ application which lists the user’s friends they ‘Send To’ and the people they have ‘Asked From’ who are on several different social networks.

Source & Copyright©2016 - fastacash

The accreditation ’socially linked by fastacash’ says it all.

P2M payments

fastacash’s objective is to make the app interface and e-commerce checkout options user-friendly and intuitive, so minimising the sales lost at checkout or earlier. This is achieved by using their patented fastalinks technology, see figure below:

Source & Copyright©2016 - fastacash

This innovative technology enables merchants to collect payments at brick-and-mortar stores as well as via e-commerce. 

fastacash have also developed a ‘request to pay’ facility which enables consumers can send a request to another to pay for their purchase, e.g. child asking their parents to pay for their purchase.

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CTMfile take: This is the future of payment systems: full integration of the payment into the whole business transaction and users’ ecosystems. fastapay’s platform and fastalinks technology integrates the key pieces in any consumer transaction with their preferred social network/way of life. 

Is fastacash, the ultimate omnichannel platform integrating all payment systems with all social networks? This will become clear over over time. It is certainly impressive and the business model - using partners to access the different market niches areound the world - opens up the global market.

For the corporate treasury department, fastacash raises some important questions: how could fastacash be used to open up new markets for your company, and is it the solution to the point of sale omni-channel payment problem?