World’s First: Dutch Social Network Hyves Integrates ‘No Fee’ Social Payments

Hyves with its 9 million Dutch profiles and around 250 million pageviews per day is by far the biggest social network in the Netherlands. Almost 60% of all Dutch inhabitants have a Hyves account.

Today Hyves announced a very powerful and interesting feature, a feature each and every social network (including Facebook, MySpace) should be envious of. Hyves  has introduced Social Payments. (read also the social media revolution is just getting started, where social banking is one of the five pillars for the future of social networking)

Hyves teamed up with the Rabobank (famous for their triple A rating as private bank) to make Hyves Payments possible.

How does it work:
With Hyves Payments you can send and receive money via your Hyves account. To each profile a link “send money to” is added and you can instantly transfer amounts up to 150 eur to any one in the network. You can connect your Hyves account to your bank account (any bank in NL will do) to add money to or withdraw money from your Hyves account.

Hyves users can also request money from their friends. Very useful after a night out

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All payments are debit payments for peer-to-peer transactions, no costs are involved.

Hyves Merchant accounts for Restaurants and Bars
At the same time Hyves Payments are open for merchants and because of a partnership with cash register system Eijsink, and mobile application MyOrder 30% of the restaurants and bars in the Netherlands instantly can accept Hyves Payments.
For Merchant payments a 0.15 eur fixed tranaction fee is charged to the merchant.

This is a perfect example of how a true local social network can add value over the big international ones. I can’t see facebook integrating a free peer-to-peer payment system for all their users. For stuff like this, deep integration and strong local partners are required. In this case Rabobank has the bank license, takes care of the money transfers and they also have an MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) that handles the text messages involved to authenticate the payment. On the merchant side a partnership with Eijsink and MyOrder.

Hyves payments will be available as of tomorrow morning at 10am (CET).

So I invite you (and especially the guys and girls at Hyves HQ) to try it out and buy me a beer for this Friday night via Hyves :)

P.S. Hyves’ Yme Bosma will share the story behind Hyves Social Payments during The Next Web Conference (register here)