The past years, we’ve seen various digital services that allow users to send money to each other without having to go to a bank and line up or even open a banking app and do your transfers. Facebook introduced a money-transfer feature on Messenger a few years back, but it was only limited in the US. Now it looks like they are slowly expanding this as they have announced that users in the UK and France will be able to do peer to peer money transfers from the messaging app as well.
According to David Marcus, head of Messenger, people often use the P2P money exchange feature during social occasions, sending friends or family members less than $50 at a time. And so they have decided to expand this feature to other markets, starting with the UK and France where there aren’t a lot of similar services. Square Cash and Venmo (from PayPal) aren’t available there yet and the upcoming Apple Pay Cash won’t be launched, at least in the UK for now.
Using this feature in Messenger is actually pretty easy and supposedly secure. You just have to link your debit card or cards to be able to send and receive money from the app. It is worth noting also that some services like PayPal and money transfer service TrasnferWise have also created bots on Messenger so you can use their service without having to leave the app itself. So you also have that option if you don’t want to transfer money directly through Messenger itself.
The UK and France rollout will be happening over the next few weeks. There is no news yet on which country will be the next and what’s the timetable for that.
SOURCE: Facebook
VIA: Bloomberg
What about the ability of paying via Gmail in the UK? This has been possible for a while now.