From Amex:
Revolution Money, launched by AOL Co-founder Steve Case’s Revolution LLC in 2007, provides secure payments through an internet based platform. … “Revolution Money has a lot of room to grow as it competes head-to-head with other online and person-to-person payment providers. We are committed to using our global brand recognition, marketing reach and network expertise to help reach a critical mass of customers,” said Kenneth I. Chenault, chairman and chief executive officer of American Express.
Plop this P2P payments platform into Amex’s customer base and watch it take over a chuck of share from PayPal. Smart move by Amex.
The only unfortunate aspect of this deal is that Revolution is one of only a handful of truly innovative startups in the financial services space — and Revolution was fortunate to have Steve Case’s money behind it. With Revolution subsumed by Amex, a bit of that creative spark has to be lost.
WSJ’s coverage here.
Len, good questions. First, here is a preliminary review from Payments News.
From what I can gather, Revolution is both a POS and online payments play. How Revolution compares vs. PayPal is somewhat beside the point, in my view. Amex has millions of accounts, and they form a natural foundation from which to grow Revolution and advance its products. I don’t know if you have checked out Amex’s Open social network, but it is impressive. Amex has structured it so that small business owners and employees can extract real value by social networking. Layering on an online payments function on top of that seems practical and possible to me. The short of it is Amex is going heavy online, and Revolution can certainly act as a component of that effort.