Facebook Messenger Will Soon Allow You to Send Money to Contacts in India
Jun. 15, 2018Facebook begantesting a peer-to-peer payments feature within the Messengerapp in India this April. It was limited to mobile recharges but Messenger has now been spotted endorsing an option to “send and receive money“, besides sending messages and video calling.
This message can be seenwhen you try to add a new contactin Facebook Messenger, giving an indication thatFacebookhas been buckling up to roll the P2P payments feature out here in India, as can be seen in the screenshots below.
AFacebook executive confirmedtoFactor Dailythat Facebook is indeed working on a payments solution on Messenger. While the option is in early stages of testing in new markets (the feature is already available to users in the US, the UK, and France), “India may not be excluded from[Facebook’s]plans“.
However, officiallyFacebook has denied the existence of such a pilot programand said this is a “technical error“. Its spokesperson said that the message was only meant to be shown to users in the countries which already have the feature on Messenger and has beenshown to Indian users mistakenly. “We are working on fixing this, and apologize for any confusion“, the spokesperson wrote to Factor Daily in an email.
Contradicting statements from two Facebook spokespersons has obviously led to confusion. But it would be naive to assume such a feature is not in the works already.
As perStatista, India has the highest number of Facebook users as of April and thismakes India a very lucrative marketfor the tech giant. Meanwhile, another of Facebook’s products,WhatsApp Pay, is also making way for most of the users who can now send money to any UPI ID using the messaging app. It wouldn’t be hard to imagine some form of interoperability between the two services.
