Send Money to Friends in Messenger

&quot;Hey <i>RELATIVE</i> it&#x27;s me here on Facebook I had to get a new account because I&#x27;m in trouble here in <i>FOREIGN COUNTRY</i> so please send me money. It&#x27;s really easy and I need it bad! Just enter your credit card and I will be saved!&quot;<p>I know, I know, it&#x27;s not the tool...but I am reminded of a certain scene from The Fifth Element...<p>&quot;I hate warriors, too narrow-minded. I&#x27;ll tell you what I do like though: a killer, a dyed-in-the-wool killer. Cold blooded, clean, methodical and thorough. Now a real killer, when he picked up the ZF-1, would&#x27;ve immediately asked about the little red button on the bottom of the gun. &quot;

At this point, I just want one of these pay-with-your-phone solutions to win and be ubiquitous.<p>The current situation is almost comical. &quot;Do you have Venmo? Haven&#x27;t set that up yet, can you send over Paypal?. No, what about Square Wallet? Nope, what about Gmail?&quot;

It&#x27;s an interesting feature, but it seems unlikely that enough people will add their card information to Facebook to make it worthwhile, considering that both the payor and payee need CC information included for the payment to work.<p>On a related note, this continues Facebook&#x27;s unfortunate user-interface decision to replace the simple &quot;send&quot; button in Facebook Messenger with a row of increasingly crowded and not-particularly-useful buttons to send various &quot;other&quot; things.

It&#x27;s interesting to note that this is yet another trend that came from Asia. Like stickers, another feature that was recently added to Messenger, this feature has long been in apps like Tencent&#x27;s WeChat.<p>And it&#x27;s used <i>extensively</i> there. Just last month, during Chinese New Year, WeChat added a feature that let Chinese users send money to their WeChat contacts, following in the tradition where people give red envelopes of money (红包) to family members and friends. From what I hear, it was <i>incredibly</i> popular—I even received one myself from a Chinese friend.<p>I wouldn&#x27;t underestimate the potential popularity of this move. Especially once they open this up to countries outside the US.

Given the number of people that have their fb accounts hacked every day, I&#x27;d be pretty concerned about giving Facebook my credit card info too.

I skimmed through the comments and thought &quot;What is Venmo and how terrible am I for not knowing about it sooner?&quot;<p>I then searched for the term on the page and noticed that the term is largely clustered around two threads; one of which the users both drop the name so much I had to check if they worked for the company.<p>No offense to those who enjoy Venmo and its services, but this thread is a great example of HN commentary echo; it&#x27;s way louder in here than it actually is.

The thing I don&#x27;t like about this is that I&#x27;m forced to become Facebook friends with someone to send or receive money. That&#x27;s an unnecessary layer of consideration.<p>I want to send and receive money quickly, easily, and cheaply. Now I&#x27;m also seeing what Ted is up to on my news feed. He&#x27;s my Facebook friend now because we were all at a restaurant last week and they didn&#x27;t let us split the bill.

The only reason this &quot;problem&quot; remains to be solved is that the US banking industry can&#x27;t get their act together. Most of the rest of the industrialized world has had near-instantaneous bank-to-bank transfers for more than a decade. Here&#x27;s a good story contrasting the UK system with the US: <a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/10/04/229224964/episode-489-the-invisible-plumbing-of-our-economy" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;money&#x2F;2013&#x2F;10&#x2F;04&#x2F;229224964&#x2F;episode-...</a><p>Expect all of these virtual wallet payment systems to die a swift death once Visa&#x2F;Mastercard&#x2F;Citi&#x2F;Bank Of America&#x2F;Chase finally pulls their finger out.

A natural addition. And just like Square Cash, just enter bank issued debit card for fee-free transactions.<p>Now if it would work outside the US and in-between different countries, that&#x27;d be the killer app. Is there anything close to that dream?

I&#x27;m surprised they don&#x27;t seem to be using any kind of wallet. From the description, transactions are only bank-to-bank, with a typical 2-3 day ACH delay. So if I pay my friend Joe $20 today, and he pays me $20 tomorrow, it still takes days to settle up. And the only record of the transaction is embedded in the chat? A wallet would have it settled up instantly.

Interesting. Facebook has over 1.1 billion users, but their existing financial systems (Facebook credits, etc) process only 1 million transactions a day. I would have thought it was higher. Of course, that&#x27;s daily, so another way to look at it is 0.1% of Facebook users pay for something on Facebook on a given day, which strangely feels high.

I wonder if there&#x27;s potential for this to be a content-creator-payment platform? That is, make tipping a publication as easy as hitting a &quot;Like&quot; on any given story...you could even have it as an extra button (I think making it a default pop-up with every &quot;Like&quot; would be detrimental to the user experience, to the point that users would just stop hitting &quot;Like&quot; for stories they actually liked)...it wouldn&#x27;t make much money for FB, perhaps, but it would create further adoption of the platform.<p>Edit: Not only might it increase adoption for the payments system, but it may further entice content creators to join FB&#x27;s nascent content-platform ambitions: <a href="http://digiday.com/platforms/facebook-youtube-premium/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;digiday.com&#x2F;platforms&#x2F;facebook-youtube-premium&#x2F;</a>

I already have a way to send money for free to any of my Facebook friends: Venmo.<p>I have had Venmo for about 4 years now (it started at my school so we were early) and it is tied with Lyft for the startup I could not live without. Last year I sent ~$8,000 and received about $8,500 on Venmo. So a $500 diff but the amount of time it saved me versus transferring that $16,000 any other way is many, many hours.<p>I don&#x27;t think Venmo does too well as a business (processing cash for free for years can&#x27;t be good business) but they have nailed the user experience.

I wonder who doesnt have his pay service yet.<p>Id rather use bitcoin.

Now I see why they hired former paypal guys, David Marcus [1] and Stan Chudnovsky [2]<p>Although I&#x27;m sure the team had been working on it for a while (given these were relatively new hires), bringing in the paypal executives helps them have a smoother launch and scale process.<p>1: <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/dmarcus" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linkedin.com&#x2F;in&#x2F;dmarcus</a><p>2: <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/stanchudnovsky" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linkedin.com&#x2F;in&#x2F;stanchudnovsky</a>

I think it&#x27;s interesting that we can now pay almost anybody we have contact with, at almost zero effort and without even having to remove my debit card from my wallet.<p>You can pay people via gmail now for your email contacts, send money to your personal friends via social media networking. I bought my Uber to work this morning completely frictionless without having to physically use my card.<p>It&#x27;s an interesting development of recent years for sure.

The old jwz quote: &quot;Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. &quot;<p>And the Cargill corollary: &quot;Every social media company attempts to expand until it can become a bank. Those companies which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. Here a bank is defined as some entity that stores and records transactions between people &quot;

Digital wallet is a huge trend everywhere right now. Besides PayPal, Square, Google, Apple, Facebook is finally joining the game. FYI, billions are flowing through similar service from Tencent&#x27;s WeChat(aka Weixin) and Weibo during this year&#x27;s Chinese&#x27;s new year and giving and receiving red envelop money via digital wallet became a new way of Chinese social phenomena.

Facebook on the shutting down of their email service:<p><i>&quot;It seems wrong that an email message from your best friend gets sandwiched between a bill and a bank statement,&quot; the company wrote in its announcement blog post for the feature. The service didn&#x27;t catch on, perhaps in part because Facebook never truly created a friendly or familiar interface for emailing.</i> [0]<p>In much the same vain, wouldn&#x27;t it be that users wouldn&#x27;t like to tolerate their friends who are going to bug them about the $20 they owe from last time since now they have no excuse to avoid payment. Because they can do it right there in the messenger?<p>This is going to be a whole new level of friends&#x2F;family and money don&#x27;t get on pretty well. Maybe just me though.<p>[0] <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/24/5443454/facebook-retires-its-email-service" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;2&#x2F;24&#x2F;5443454&#x2F;facebook-retires-i...</a>

Wow, this is a really interesting play by Facebook to gather finance details of their users. I can absolutely see an scenario where friend X wants to pay friend Y who hasn&#x27;t enabled Pay and they nag until friend Y does sign up. The cycle will continue. It&#x27;s probably part of a bigger venture into eCommerce for Facebook.

A lot of people are commenting about Facebook being &quot;yet another entrant&quot; into the wallet &amp; payment game. I&#x27;d enjoy the ease and simplicity of having everyone on a single payment platform as much as the next guy, but it&#x27;s simply not realistic. There&#x27;s too much at stake for Google, Apple, Paypal, Square etc. to just give up.<p>Instead, I could see this taking a similar direction as web authentication: instead of &quot;Login with Google+&quot; or &quot;Login with Facebook&quot; buttons, you have &quot;Send $ to Google Wallet&quot; in your FB-pay interface.<p>I&#x27;d also point out that Facebook, by virtue of having a ton of data about their users, is well positioned to do things like identity assertion and fraud analytics; two of the more critical aspects of digital payment. Makes sense to me that they join the fray.

Honestly, I&#x27;d feel very uncomfortable making giving money this easy. Even with a physical wallet, it&#x27;s still a two-step process.

I use Square cash sometimes and I think it&#x27;s pretty good, I don&#x27;t think I would use this. A Facebook account is already a target for hacking, let alone bringing payment info into the situation.<p>If a friend had this but didn&#x27;t have Square, that wouldn&#x27;t be enough to sway me to put my CC in Facebook. I just don&#x27;t think I can bring myself to do that.

I believe this was called project 419 internally.

Not in a million years I will give my financial info to Facebook. Not. Fucking. Happening. Ever.

&quot;Need a ultra-secured phoned with 2 level authentication on messages &quot;<p>What happens if I lose my phone , someone adds himself and send money , oh crap ! But Facebook knows where we are sending money , will it be helpful enough to nab a thief ?

It would be interesting if a user&#x27;s social graph could be used to assess creditworthiness. If so they could remove a lot of friction either by reducing fees or assuming a certain degree of credit upfront.

It&#x27;s interesting that the B-Roll video is not hosted on Facebook.<p>BTW I just send money using PayPal to a Facebook friend and let him know using Facebook messenger. I would totally use this when it&#x27;s available.

Free? How? Any company charge you processing fees when you use credit card

Does anybody know how Venmo and now FB can send&#x2F;wire between debit cards for free? What happens to the % Visa&#x2F;Mastercard demand? Is something like this coming for Stripe?

Can I say Facebook is just a copycat of Wechat, Weibo and other Internet services on this feature? Hundreds of millions of Chinese have used these feature for more than one year.

This is a game changer. I love venmo and its Facebook integration, but not everyone wants to set up a new account. This is going to make sending money to friends really easy.

I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if Apple follows the trend and introduces payments through imessage. They could make it pretty simple if they link it to Apple Pay&#x2F;Touch ID.

Introducing Snapcash! <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBwjxBmMszQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=kBwjxBmMszQ</a>

Do people honestly conduct this much commerce with their friends and family that they require an intermediary service for it?

I think this would be more interesting in WhatsApp than in Facebook Messenger, because the different kind of graph you have.

Did they build out this technology themselves, or was it through an acquisition?<p>On a side note - no AmEx or Bank Account option...

at this point, who cares? You can do this everywhere, and I will definitely try and pick a dedicated service (probably Venmo) to do this. I know they spend all of their time and energy working on it, rather than it just being a feature

Any news if this will be opened up through one of their Developer API&#x27;s?

Next step: Connecting in-app-payments so they can be paid by someone else.

&gt; This feature will be rolling out over the coming months in the US.<p>Fucking typical.

Oh, yes, like I&#x27;m going to give FB my credit card info.

What&#x27;s funny about this is that this happens to be snapchat&#x27;s monetization strategy, too. It&#x27;s funny because FB wanted to buy snapchat, snapchat said no, and now FB has implemented their strategy.<p>I&#x27;m amused.

Finally, i can satisfy the urge to send money to friends.<p>Seriously?

Far from the first person to mention it, but im fairly sure we have had this for a while.<p><a href="http://i.imgur.com/lczQmNQ.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;lczQmNQ.png</a>

Deleting Square Cash and Paypal...

&quot;Dear Sir&#x2F;Madam,&quot;<p>&quot;I am a wealthy Nigerian heir of our national oil company. I need my funds unlocked but unfortunately do not have $100 for internet access. Please send $100 and you will get your share of my inheritance in the billions of dollar.&quot;

does this say something about how fast snapchat is innovating?