With New Alternative Payments Product, AmEx Threatens PayPal, Visa

Bank Innovation suspected new P2P entrants would enter the market soon. Try American Express out for size.

Saying bye bye to its historically elite-only customer mentality policy, AmEx has plunged into the messy virtual wallet war by debuting a digital payment and commerce platform of its own today.

AmEx’s new payment service, called Serve, allows customers to make alternative payments, including P2P money transfers, mobile payments, in-store card payments and online transactions. Plus, consumers can withdraw cash at ATMs using their Serve prepaid cards. For all of these financial services actions, customers can fund their accounts through bank accounts, credit cards, debit cards or payments from other Serve accounts. The service is available today in the United States and is expected to hit international markets in the coming months.

The end goal of Serve is nothing short of providing a digital alternative to consumers relying on cash, check and debit cards, so that paper and plastic will become a moot point. In other words, Serve is another aspiring e-wallet to enter an already very crowded market.

Visa, just a few weeks earlier, leaked that it will offer P2P capabilities this year, and PayPal has been on that payment journey for years now. Not to mention all the smaller players hovering in the payment market like Square and FaceCash. Naturally, AmEx has a lot going for it to help Serve sink its teeth into the payments market; namely, its size. What’s particularly interesting about AmEx’s new offering is that it takes a bold leap forward in blurring the online/offline payments line that many industry experts, including PayPal execs, expect to be common place soon enough.

Key to its success — key to any of the payments players’ success — is getting consumers to embrace the technology. Naturally, fees are crucial to this likability equation.

To lure in people to Serve, AmEx, for one, said it’s dropping “most consumer fees” for the first six months. After the that time elapses, the fees will include:

– Putting money into a Serve account: 2.9% + 30c/per load, discounted to 0% for cash, debit and ACH; and
– ATM cash withdrawal (after first one each month free): $2.00.

In addition, Serve won’t have fees for a number of financial services actions, including: opening an account, monthly fees, P2P transactions, establishing up to four sub-accounts and widget usage.

Also to Serve’s favor is that AmEx said it would be getting a good share of development attention.

“We intend to quickly evolve the Serve platform by adding new features and functionality as we learn from consumer and merchant experiences,” said Dan Schulman, group enterprise of enterprise growth, in a statement.

Serve can be accessed through Serve Apple iOS and Android applications, and more notably, through Facebook.

Serve was born from technology AmEx gained through its acquisition of Revolution Money in early 2010.