Facebook Messenger is gearing up to allow friends to send each other money.
Andrew Aude, iOS developer, posted a screenshot to Twitter, illustrating the possible new functionality where users can select a bank account or credit card tied to their Facebook account.
According to reports all transactions that occur over the Facebook Messenger app, will be kept private.
At this point in time, it is unclear whether Facebook will monetize the Messenger app by assessing a fee for money transfers or offer up the functionality for free to ramp up Messenger application usage.
It’s now pretty apparent why former president of PayPal, David Marcus, is now the new head of Messenger. Facebook Messenger could potentially compete with PayPal, Square Cash and other peer-to-peer money transfer applications.
Many messenger apps like Apple iMessage, WhatsApp and Rakuten’s Viber, try to differentiate themselves with stickers, emoticons, games, commerce or social networking.
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Facebook hopes that bundling the payment feature into the Messenger app will give people an extra incentive to choose the Facebook Messenger app while also beating out any peer-to-peer dedicated apps in it’s path, like Venmo.
Andrew Aude believes Facebook will enable the feature in the United States within the next few months and then ultimately in other parts of the world for internal testing. It could be a while though until the public gains access to the payments feature.
