Why Messaging and Payment Platforms are Converging

December 11, 2014 By: Michael Foster

Korean messaging app Line, which is massively popular in Japan and Taiwan, announced a new mobile payments service.

Line isn’t the first. WeChat began mobile payments earlier this year, as did KakaoTalk more recently. In fact, if you live in Asia, it’s pretty likely that you use the same app for payments and messages.

Why are messaging and payments such a natural fit, and why is this happening in Asia before the west?

To answer that question, we first need to understand what money is in the first place. That is a difficult question, and it remains hotly debated by economists, philosophers, bitcoin evangelists, and pretty much anyone with a bank account. But whatever else money may be, it is clearly one thing: a form of communication.

If you provide me with a product or a service and I give you some money in exchange, I’m telling you that I believe what you have given me is worth what I’ve just given you. If you accept my money, you’re also telling me that you agree on the value of my money, and that it is equal to what you have given me.

In other words, a financial transaction is a way of communicating value and worth to each other, in much the same way as an inane message on WhatsApp that some dress is cute or some car is awesome communicates a similar, albeit more abstract, sense of value.

We often don’t think of money this way, but we should. On the internet, money has increasingly become a way of signaling the value of a statement.

A few years ago, bloggers began experimenting with the tip jar, albeit with uneven success. More recently, Redditors began tipping each other for good comments with bitcoin, then dogecoin, litecoin, and other kinds of magic internet money.

Then Reddit got smart and encouraged use of its “Give Gold” button so you can tip commenters directly by giving them an enhanced version of Reddit (and give Reddit your money) to indicate the value of the given comment.

Other forms of micropayments for media have exploded in recent years, like Kickstarters for movies such as Zach Braff’s or a Kickstarter to fund a feminist video series. These payments weren’t just made to help these projects come into existence—they were ways of people expressing value with money.

So why not extend this trend to actual payments between friends, colleagues, and contacts? This is what Line, WeChat, and KakaoTalk are anticipating, and it is only a matter of time for the trend to extend to the west.