Bangalore: With a steadily growing number of online financial transactions, banks have been steered to nurture their presence on social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Flicker. Analysts Stessa Cohen and Peter Redshaw from Gartner, see this as an opportunity red that social media networks could use to add to their flow of income beyond simple advertising.

The analysts see Twitpay, Facebook Credits, and BeatThatQuote by Google as the starting point for such ventures since they allow users to compare and aggregate resources via their credit cards and small loans. Juergen Weiss, another analyst from Gartner, said a major social network could pioneer in the business of Property and Casualty insurance by the end of 2014.  

Online debt management services, including as mint.com, and ReadyForZero, help people address questions such as “When do I approach a bank for a loan?” and “By when will the credit on my card be paid off?” However, all of these services are more run by websites that work similar to social networks, and Gartner says Citibank and other conventional banks have adapted to allow users make transactions via these networks rather than having to access a traditional banking website for the same.

With features such as Facebook’s Timeline feature that allow users to share the most important events of their lives—and tools such as Radian6 from SalesForce.com that help financial institutions search for and scan these events, Weiss sees an opportunity for social networks to anticipate and counter financial institutions by providing banking services and progressively, insurance services.