With the introduction of Facebook Group Payments option in messenger, you can now use the messenger application to send and receive payments easily from any of the group members. Though the service started back in the year 2015, it hasn’t lifted up even though it’s one of the widely used services.
Today, you can find a number of applications jumping into mobile payments. Facebook’s group payment option has lots of connections to its earlier services. It introduced a peer-to-peer payment service for the US market, which made use of debit cards from US banks. Facebook also introduced allowing interactions with business on its platform in the same month. In the year 2016, Facebook introduced its bot platform to interact with users using chatbots. With the introduction of group payments, Facebook has put itself into payments through messaging services.
With the advancing technology, the number of messenger users are surely going to increase and so does the payment front has to pick up pace. For now, the service only works in the US for the people having a debit card issued by US banks.
How it’s done
Making payment through Facebook messaging app could be quite effective; however, it is way behind its competitors, like WeChat. WeChat allows you to pay for daily items in addition to making payments to friends and family. Moreover, it also supports a number of credit and debit cards supported by Tencent. However, Tencent charges 0.01 percent for each transaction, which results in twice as much earning as PayPal. Line Pay is another messaging app similar to WeChat; however, it is not limited to China.
A similar update can be seen in Truecaller app as well. It has introduced a new flash messaging section and Truecaller Pay. The messaging service also allows cashless payments either using UPI ID or a registered mobile number. WhatsApp owned by Facebook is also working on a similar digital payment system whose reach would be much wider and will boost digital transactions.
