For the first time, Facebook has launched mobile payments via Messenger outside the United States. The service initially launched in the U.S. in 2015 and has caught on when users want to send payments that would have previously been made with fairly small amounts of money under $50.
Explaining the company’s motivation for the rollout, David Marcus, the Messenger product manager, said:
“More and more people are having conversations on Messenger about paying one another. As a result it’s a very natural place for you to have the most frictionless and secure way of paying each other.”
In order to nudge users to begin using the payment option, Facebook is launching M suggestions, a virtual assistant which observes your chats and whenever the topic of sending money arises, M suggestions will pipe up and try to get you using Facebook’s payment system. In order to send money, both the sender and recipient have to register their payment cards with the service.
With its large user base, Messenger is in a very good position to deploy this payment option, and if it catches on there will certainly be fewer people that are considering to quit the social network due the inconveniences around payments that it would cause; it’ll be interesting to see whether it can supplant PayPal which is commonly used for making mobile payments in the UK right now.
Source: BBC News