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Facebook Messenger Adds Friend-To-Friend Payments

In various ways, Facebook has competed with most of the major online forces around. Their social media functions compete with Twitter and Snapchat; their search functions compete with Google and Bing; their ownership of Instagram even pits them against a number of other image and video sharing services. Now, it appears that Facebook is ready to go up against payment services such as PayPal, as they have just officially announced that Facebook Messenger is adding a friend-to-friend payment service that is free of charge.

Using this feature is fairly simple. A user simply needs to add their debit card information in Facebook Messenger’s setting sections. Then, you select the ‘$’ icon in Facebook Messenger and tap ‘pay’. From there, any user can send any amount of money directly into their friend’s bank account. Facebook has plenty of experience with transactions and mobile payments through their apps and games, so the security of one’s debit card information won’t have to be something to worry about.

Facebook’s goal is to offer this feature as a convenience. They recognize that people are already going to be logging time on Facebook, so why should they have to spend time adding friends to another application like Venmo (an app running similar features, offered by PayPal) when they can already use their existing list of Facebook friends? Though it’s too early to tell if this feature will be the death of other payment apps, Facebook certainly has the upper hand here.