Facebook has combined all of the tasks we do on a daily basis and incorporated them into their site. This makes life as a whole lot less complicated for users. Now we can discuss and share our lives, like always, message our friends in Messenger, make phone calls, make video calls, and the latest inclusion, send cash! Let’s take a look at this money situation …

Facebook just uncovered an all new service that helps you send money by means of its instant messaging app, Facebook Messenger. It’s kinda like existing services from SnapChat, Square, and Venmo, letting you immediately exchange cash with other individuals both far and wide. But there’s a substantial distinction: It works on Facebook.

Now that you can send money with Facebook instantaneously, all of a sudden, it’s way simpler for a big chunk of the population to send out and receive cash. But friend-to-friend payments can also feed the much greater objectives of Mark Zuckerberg and company.

The moment Facebook has your bank card, it can easily tempt you with other purchases too.
Facebook’s new payments tool encourages all those millions of Facebookers to keep their credit card details on the company’s machines. And this will most likely feed Facebook’s initiatives to turn itself into a sort of e-commerce engine that competes directly with the likes of Amazon.Facebook is currently trying out a “buy” button on its social network that lets you immediately buy stuff that shows up in your newsfeed. However such button is a whole lot more effective and easier to click if you’ve already typed in your card into Facebook.

Facebook is going in the same direction as Apple and Google. It wishes to be the spot where you spend not only your time but your cash.

Payments On Facebook Are No Surprise

The new Facebook service is not a surprise. Last summer, David Marcus, the Chief Executive Officer of payments giant PayPal, joined Facebook to manage Messenger. And subsequently, on a Facebook earnings call, CEO and creator Mark Zuckerberg suggested that Messenger would dovetail with some kind of peer-to-peer payments service.

Meanwhile, Snapchat incorporated a payments method to its favored messaging app, piggybacking on an existing tool from San Francisco start-up Square. But Snapchat isn’t nearly as well-known as Facebook. And its variety of other services is not even close to as big.

The Facebook social network is used by over 1.3 billion users globally, and Messenger now provides services to close to 500 million, according to the company’s most current public numbers. That’s probably about two and a half times the volume on SnapChat.

This indicates that many more users are likely to use Facebook’s payments solution in comparison to others. But more vital for Facebook, especially due to the fact that it claims it’s never going to charge for sending and receiving funds, is your data, in this particular situation, your credit card numbers. To send money, you will have to save your Visa or Mastercard details with Facebook. To receive money, the company revealed, you will have to do the very same. And once Facebook has that information, it is able to construct out services– revenue-generating services– that motivate you to spend.

So on one hand it makes it more convenient for users to send money to each other and the appealing aspect is that they don’t take a cut. However, alternatively, Facebook is gearing up to take on significant online retailers. What are your thoughts? Is it good to have the convenience or does this worry you that it would be far too easy to spend?

JHG Media Group offers social media management, SEO services, and content development to small and medium sized businesses around the globe.