It seems that just about everyone wants a piece of mobile payments, whether it be through physically paying for goods and services with your mobile device or by giving users the option to send payments to other people digitally using their phone. Facebook’s option became the latter, having introduced their person-to-person payment option for Messenger earlier this year. At the time though it wasn’t available to everyone. As of today, Facebook has announced that anyone using Messenger in the U.S. can now send payments through to other people securely and for free. Now some users may have already had this option available prior to today’s announcement, so the presence of Facebook’s person-to-person payments is not what’s new here.
What is new is the fact that it’s now open to anyone in the U.S. regardless of device or carrier. So if you have Messenger installed, you can send payments to anyone you wish who happens to be a Facebook friend. Before you can get started with the whole ordeal you’ll need to take a couple of steps to ensure things go smoothly, that being the act of entering in your debit card information into the app. Once that’s done you should be good to go. Facebook doesn’t make any mention of whether or not users will be able to enter in credit cards at any point, so for now debit cards are the only option.
When you send money it comes straight from your checking account and moves to another person’s checking account pretty much hassle free, so there’s no need to wait for days on end for money to transfer through from a digital wallet account like PayPal into a checking account, as each person’s checking account information is linked through the app. The sending money process is truly quite painless, and all you have to do is tap on the dollar sign once you’re in a conversation with one of your Facebook friends. After that just enter in the dollar amount for how much you want to send and hit the send button in the top right corner and that’s it.