The social network’s peer to peer smartphone transactions will be enabled through its Messenger app outside the U.S.
The largest social network in the world is now taking its Facebook mobile payments outside the United States for the first time. This move is meant to make it possible for users to be able to send money to each other by way of the official Messenger texting application.
To start, the mobile payments service will be headed toward users in the United Kingdom.
The feature will touch down in the U.K. within the next couple of weeks. To be able to use the Facebook mobile payments, they will need to register their debit cards with the service.
“In the U.S. most people use payments in Messenger to send less than $50 at a time,” said Messenger head, David Marcus. He added to the statement by saying that at the moment, this mobile payments feature is most commonly used by attendees of social occasions.
The original version of the Facebook mobile payments first launched in the United States in 2015.
At the moment, users of the mobile payments service are not charged any fee for the money they transfer to each other. The lack of fees and the expansion of the transactions service is Facebook’s latest move in a growing global trend among many tech giants. They are all trying their own strategies to carve out a place for themselves in the highly promising worldwide mobile payments industry.
Many different players are currently doing everything they can to launch various services and features in the hopes of appealing to the largest possible number of worldwide users. For instance, Apple Inc will be launching the iMessage service with an added Apple Pay Cash feature that allows iOS device owners to send money to each other. Similarly, Square created a product called Square Cash. PayPal recently announced its Venmo, which has already gained popularity among the younger demographic.
That said, in the United Kingdom, the options are few and far between among the largest players in the tech industry. Apple Pay Cash, Venmo and Square Cash are all unavailable to British consumers. That said, mobile device users in that market are very comfortable with the use of their devices for making payments. In fact, London’s public transit busses no longer accept cash. Moreover, consumers are widely using Android Pay, Apple Pay and other contactless services.
That being the case, it makes sense that Facebook mobile payments would be headed to the U.K. as they make their way out of the United States for the first time.
