Your bank information combined with Snapchat sounds like a nightmare that just became a reality.

Through a festive video, Snapchat announced the addition of its newest feature, Snapcash, which allows users to send money to their friends instantly. Snapchat will have a hard time convincing users to store their debit card info on an app that gets so much daily use and has a history of hacking and security issues. From a business standpoint the move makes sense, but Snapchat doesn’t seem like the right platform for personal finances.

Snapchat could potentially use the personal information from the debit cards to improve targeted advertising through a partnership with Square Cash. Depending on how the confirmation process works, Snapcash also sets up the possibility of purchasing items directly  from ad videos, according to a Tuesday TechCrunch article.

Sure, there are benefits, but it will be an uphill climb to get millennials on board with such a radical idea. After Snapchat was hacked for 90,000 photos in October, the app doesn’t have the strongest trust with its users. It will take a long time, if ever, for snapping a friend money to be considered normal.

For starters, the average age of Snapchat users is 18, according to Forbes, and that demographic isn’t exactly rolling in cash. Users are only allowed to use the Snapcash feature if they are 18 or older so that may hurt the overall number of potential users. And God forbid parents begin to join the Snapchat party to ship you a few dollars.

There is also the chance that this opens the door to people sending photos for money or drug exchanges, which could get messy. Snapchat may be a little ahead of its time with Snapcash and it seems to benefit advertisers more than consumers.  

Some tech critics believe this is the first of many social network-mobile payment marriages. Facebook would probably be a better location for quick money transfers due to its massive amount of users worldwide. Snapchat has a very limited audience ranging grade school to college students and therefore, Snapcash probably won’t get much use.

Snapcash and Apple’s Apple Pay suggest we are on the verge of a big push for more mobile payments. I’m not quite sold on the safety of these types of transactions if hackers have already proven they can crack the code. Since there’s no password required once your Snapchat profile is saved, it feels too easy for someone else to get ahold of your bank information.

Valued at an estimated $10 billion dollars, Snapchat is searching for ways to keep its stock high but this seems like a reach. We’ve come from Western Union to one-tap transactions and it feels like the importance of financial security has been sacrificed for convenience.

So when it comes to paying with my phone, I’ll just stick to Starbucks’ mobile app.

Aarick Knighton is a junior information management and technology major. His column appears weekly. He can be reached at adknight@syr.edu and followed on Twitter @aarickurban.

Published on November 20, 2014 at 12:01 am