Revolution Online Money Transfer Service Pits Itself Against paypal - InformationWeek

Startup Revolution Money, an online payment service that's up against EBay's popular PayPal, launched on Thursday as a new option money-transfer service.

The company's Revolution Money Exchange service enables subscribes to shift money from their depository financial institution business relationships to each other. People interested in the service, which is available at no charge, must subscribe up through

Revolution Money an investing company formed by Steve Case, AOL co-founder and former president and CEO. The subordinate trusts to attain immature grownups on the Web who are active in societal webs and other online communities.

"We desire to go for societal webs what PayPal is for EBay," Teddy Boy Leonsis, president for Revolution Money, said last calendar month at the Web 2.0 Acme in San Francisco.

The company have recently launched a RevolutionCard recognition card that the payment service is selling as a more than unafraid option to traditional recognition card game from MasterCard or Visa.

"First, the card itself is anonymous, so it doesn't have got the cardholder's name
on the card," Jason Hogg, chief executive officer and laminitis of Revolution Money, told InformationWeek in a recent interview. "Nor makes it incorporate any information about the cardholder in the magnetic stripe."

In addition, the card cannot be used without knowing the user's personal designation number, and it exposes what the company phone calls a "disassociated business relationship number," which intends that the figure on the card is not the existent business relationship number.

Revolution Money trusts to involvement merchandisers with an interchange fee of 0.5%, which is considerably less than the 1.9% charged to merchandisers by other recognition card companies. The company's initial statistical distribution platform is AOL's blink of an eye messaging waiter AIM. A nexus to Revolution Money is available through the purpose client.

In trying to catch a piece of the online payment market, Revolution Money is competing against far bigger players. EBay-owned PayPal is the dominant service with 143 million user business relationships worldwide.

Google have an online payment service called Google Checkout, launched about a twelvemonth ago. That service, however, have yet to do any headroom against PayPal.

In addition, Google with the U.S. Patent and Hallmark Office for a mobile payments service that would let users to do payments at retail stores using their mobile phones.

InformationWeek editor at big Seth Thomas Claburn contributed to this story.