Elon Musk pursues banking in wake of rivals’ failed attempts

financialpost.com:

Billionaire Elon Musk’s grand vision is to turn Twitter into a one-stop shop for financial services. It’s hardly the first time a tech giant has sought to muscle in on Jamie Dimon’s turf.

The landscape is filled with technology firms that aimed to do the same thing: Facebook spent years investing in a project called Libra that was supposed to revolutionize cross-border payments, but regulatory scrutiny forced it to abandon the project. Google planned a digital financial offering and even lined up 11 banks as partners for the launch before it suddenly nixed the entire plan. And Amazon.com Inc. considered offering chequing accounts for consumers, but that project never became a reality.

United States tech companies have struggled in their attempts to take on banking behemoths, often scaling back their ambitions in the face of competition and protracted approval processes. But Musk isn’t like other tech executives: his business decisions don’t tend to follow predictable paths — as evidenced by his many shocking moves at Twitter, including abandoning its iconic bird-based brand for the letter X — and he does have experience in financial technology, having founded the firm now known as PayPal Holdings Inc.

“I’m not saying at all that he can’t do it,” Pranav Sood, executive general manager at cross-border payments platform Airwallex. “But it’s something that takes time and it’s something that takes investment because you have to make sure that you do things right in order to stay compliant globally.”

Musk’s envisioned X app — which will connect Twitter’s underlying infrastructure with X.com, a web address that now functions as a routing service to Twitter — is one that layers communication, multimedia and “the ability to