Facebook Adding User to User Payments Inside Facebook Messenger

Information has leaked that Facebook is working on a mobile payments service to complement their other apps and services presently offered. This would follow hot on the heels of Apple's move into e-payments with their Apple Pay platform supported by the Touch ID fingerprint scanner included with both of the latest iPhones and likely the new iPad Air 2 as well.

The knowledge about their payment features in development didn't come from Facebook themselves but via TechCrunch who had published a piece about Andrew Aude, a Stanford University student, who used the Mac OS X-based hacking software Cycript to discover a feature inside the current Facebook Messenger standalone messaging app that hadn't been activated yet.

Aude went on Twitter to post about his discovery including some screenshots as proof. The information gathered indicated that the feature would work similarly to the Square Cash app that permits users to use the app on their smart phone or tablet to send money using their debit card as the payment method.

Facebook & Payments Makes Sense

This is an interesting development for Facebook as it was long suspected that they wished to get into the digital payment space. The somewhat unpopular move to separate out messaging away from the main Facebook app to the Facebook Messaging standalone app makes more sense now. The hiring of David Marcus, former PayPal president in June also ties neatly into this new strategy for e-payments. Facebook users will be able to send messages back and forth and make payments between each other without the need for a third party application like PayPal or even Apple Pay.

Debit Card Processing Only

Aude looked more closely into the app and discovered that presently it is setup to work with debit cards, but credit cards and bank accounts presently aren't configured. Debit cards are cheaper to process transactions than credit cards. Typically a single debit card transaction can cost approximately 50 cents per transaction. Initially it is expected that payments with be one-on-one transactions between two individual parties, but that it is possible that multiple party payments could be rolled out later.

Aude was not the first to find evidence of the payments code inside the Facebook Messenger app. Jonathan Zdziarski was looking through Objective C code used in iOS apps and found code for Facebook payments too.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg also commented in the Q2 earnings call that he expected some degree of overlap between Messenger and payments. He also described that it will help consumers but also businesses with payment management. It is still expected that a release will be a few months yet.