Payment system in a social networksite

Welcome to my new blog! I also will pay attention in this blog to a new “phenomenon” in Holland, just like I did in my previous blog. In Holland we have a popular social networksite, called Hyves. Just to keep in touch with friends and to “find” old friends, like Facebook for instance. This site has recently added a payment system to transfer money to friends or to do micro payments to organizations.
They linked an application for a mobile phone to the site to make it possible. This application, called “My Order”, makes it possible to pay a drink in your favourite bar or to pay a pizza for example. I don’t know if this possibility is useful and if this is what all Hyves users were waiting for, but time will tell. Hyves guarantees that all payments will securely be processed. It is possible to guarantee this, because they make use of a digital wallet (MiniTix), developed by a Dutch bank (Rabobank). All Hyves users can make use of this payment system now, even though if they aren’t registered at MiniTix. They do not even have to have an account at the Rabobank. Users only have to make sure that their mobile phone number is linked to the payment system and that they have to deposit money on their Hyves account. This account does have a limit for people who want to deposit a lot of money. MiniTix does have a function which ensures that people have the possibility to deposit money automatically from their bank account to their Hyves account when their digital wallet is empty. The video below shows how the payment system works.



It is intended that Hyves users can do transactions to at least 30 percent of the catering establishments in the beginning of next year. Until today, users can only do transactions at 13 cinema’s and dozens of restaurants in 21 cities. Hyves in general is still very popular as evidenced by the growing numbers of members. There are almost ten million registered members of which nine million Dutch.

My doubts about the system
The future will tell us how popular Hyves’ payment system is going to be, but in my opinion there are quite a few snags to this innovative social payment system. Since (young) children aren’t responsible enough to “work” with this kind of systems. There are already too much kids with enormous mobile phone bills. I think this says enough about how kids think about money in general and about how they deal with things where they are simply not responsible enough for. Just because they don’t think about the consequences. It is simply incalculable for them and they shouldn’t even think about such matters. Parents cannot control their children all day long so they have plenty of time to figure out how they can use the payment system. The general conditions say that kids under 18 can’t use their system, but they can just indicate that they are above 18. Who is going to control if everybody who is using the system is 18 or older? I don’t know. So as you can conclude, in my opinion it is to “dangerous”, since almost all children do have a Hyves account, but I hope that Hyves has discussed all possible scenario’s before they implemented this system. Time will tell!
Please leave a comment and let me know what you think about this situation.