Screenshots Indicate PayPal-Style Payments May Be Coming To Facebook Messenger

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Facebook Messenger reportedly includes a hidden person-to-person money transfer feature which only needs activation by engineers at the social network to be usable, a Stanford University computer science student has discovered.
Screenshots and video obtained using the iOS development tool Cycript and posted to Twitter by the student, Andrew Aude, depict a page listing saved debit cards (but not credit cards), a payment history and a way to switch PIN numbers on or off in the Messenger app.
Once activated, Messenger’s payment option would allow users of the service to send money to their fellow users in much the same way they send photos, explained Josh Constine of TechCrunch. He added that it was unclear if Facebook would charge a fee for the service or offer it at no cost in order to encourage increased usage of the Messenger app.
That decision, Constine said, “will be up to David Marcus, the new head of Messenger who was formerly the president of PayPal. Why Facebook chose to poach Marcus is now obvious: Facebook Messenger payments could compete with Venmo, PayPal, Square Cash, and other peer-to-peer money transfer apps.”
Aude, who according to his Twitter bio is also a security researcher and iOS developer, told VentureBeat’s Barry Levine that he was inspired to use Cycript to investigate Messenger after another security researcher first reported finding payment-related code in the app last month. He added that it did not even appear to be necessary to link a bank account in order to use the service, and that while PayPal was listed in the code, he found no option to use that service.
According to Levine, Aude also said the payments program currently only allows person-to-person transactions, though money transfers among multiple participants were apparently mentioned as a future option. The transactions were made via an ACH [Automated Clearing House] electronic transfer to the checking account of the recipient, though it is currently unclear how that information will be entered into the app. The transaction will be kept private.
As Constine noted, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during the social network’s second-quarter earnings call that there would eventually be “some overlap between [Messenger] and payments,” and that “the payments piece will be a part of what will help drive the overall success and help people share with each other and interact with businesses.” However, he suggested at the time that the feature would not be available any time soon.
“There’s so much groundwork for us to do,” Zuckerberg said, according to TechCrunch. He urged investors and analysts to change their estimates of the website’s revenue if they expected the payment feature to be launched in the near future, “because we’re not going to. We’re going to take the time to do this in the way that is going to be right over multiple years.”
“There’s no word of when Messenger may get updated with support for payments,” added The Verge reporter Dante D’Orazio. “Even though the code for the service appears to already be built into the app, it’s possible that it’s only there to facilitate limiting testing, and it may not indicate that a launch is imminent.”
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