Sunday, March 22, 2015
Wednesday, March 18, 2015
FB new payment options
Facebook Messenger Adds Peer-to-Peer Payments Feature
March 17, 2015, 12:00 PM PDT
Facebook users can now send money to one another through the company’s standalone messaging app, Messenger.
The long-rumored product was unveiled Tuesday, and lets users tie their debit card to their Facebook account in order to pass money through messaging. The Messenger app now includes a small “$” icon above the keyboard which opens a payments screen where users can type the amount they wish to send.
The money is then transferred through Facebook, which holds the money for “seconds” before sending it along to the other user’s bank, according to Facebook product manager Steve Davis. If the recipient doesn’t have a card attached to his or her account, Facebook will hold the money until they’ve set one up.
The new product makes Facebook an instantaneous competitor to other peer-to-peer payments companies like Venmo, Square and even Snapchat, which rolled out a similar pay-through-text service in November called Snapcash.
“We realized that there were all these conversations [on Messenger] that were forced to go somewhere else in order to actually finish,” Davis said. “You had to go to another platform to actually pay another person.”
Unlike Snapchat, which partnered with Square to handle the actual money transfers, Facebook built its entire system in-house. That means that debit card info will be housed on Facebook servers.
The company has stored data like this for years already when people pay for games or gifts through the platform. Messenger payments are a good way to get more debit cards on file in case Facebook does decide to expand further into commerce later on; the company is already partnering with Stripe to power the Buy button, and that test is likely to expand.
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