Now send cash to your Friends via Facebook Messenger
Facebook is on a roll since the last year and it seems evident from the acquisitions made by the company like WhatsApp, Oculus Rift. The Find etc. and the list is endless. It seems like Facebook wants to be everywhere and in every business no matter what and it is doing quite well if we see their progress report in the past two years, when before a couple of years people started writing off Facebook that the Social networking site is on the verge of extinction but Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg thought differently and how different Facebook has looked in the next couple of years that followed.
The Facebook F8 conference was a major hit and Facebook has another feather in their cap, now you can send money to your friends via Facebook messenger.
How can you send money on Facebook?
Always has been on my fantasy list that a friend of mine could me some cash with a ping in times of distress and the beauty with Facebook is that they always deliver at a time when you need it the most. Facebook now hopes that their loyal user base will use this new feature of Messenger app for payments instead of paying through other services that are being launched every now and then. Facebook then officially announced that Facebook friends can now send cash to each other and this service is free, there will be no charges for that.
How will it actually work?
Facebook users, in order to send cash to their friends on Facebook will have to connect their bank account information from their MasterCard or Visa debit card.Users activate the feature by tapping a dollar sign while chatting with a friend in Facebook’s Messenger app. About 500 million people currently use Messenger and it will be a free beta testing of sorts for the Social Networking giant.
Competitors of Facebook
The new feature helps Facebook stave off a growing list of competitors. For example, Square has partnered with Snapchat in November, giving the users an easy way to send cash to one another.PayPal’s Venmo and Square Cash also link to users’ debit cards, making it easy to split a bill among friends.
Industry insiders are impressed with Facebook’s new move to add payment options from Facebook and they feel it is audacious of Facebook to try something of this sort without any prior experience of the service, it is like a leap of faith. This payment feature could help Facebook dominate mobile app messaging. Last year, Facebook had nearly 1.2 billion monthly users logging from a mobile device, but not many use the Messenger and that was disheartening for Facebook. Facebook acquired WhatsApp last year for a staggering $19 billion with an active count of 700 million users around the globe, but it doesn’t have a payment service so this is a smart move to offer payments from Messenger.
Nisarg is the Business Development Manager at Nimblechapps, a top mobile game development company and has been with the organisation since its inception in 2014. He likes to update his knowledge on changing trends in technology and marketing and pens his thoughts regarding the same on various blogs and LinkedIn.