Facebook’s Messenger Now Has Support For Group Payments

About a couple of years ago, the world’s number one social media platform had began supporting a person to person payments feature on its Messenger. Fast forwarding to 2017, Facebook has officially revealed that it is expanding the feature in order to include support groups. For those not yet familiar with the payments feature, it basically lets users pay either an individual, somebody in a group chat, or everyone in a group chat all at once by simply tapping the payments icon (which is rendered as a dollar sign graphic). 

Selecting the payments icon can be accomplished by first tapping on the plus sign located in the lower left section of the group chat. This particular section is also where the other features (like games, location info sharing, and ride hailing, just to name a few) are contained via a brand new, scroll friendly UI that was launched together with the social media giant’s M assistant not too long ago.

Apart from being allowing payments to be sent to other group chat members, the feature also lets people request payments from everybody in the conversation. This can be done by simply entering the cash amount desired (you can provide the total sum, or the estimated individual contribution from each member). Users are also free to put a note about what the payments are for (for example, to purchase drinks for the pool party). Then from there, it is just a matter of tapping “Request” and send it out to all the members of the group chat. In the group conversation, a message will then be displayed whenever somebody has sent payment, with details made available by viewing the Request Details in full screen. Facebook has pointed out that its group payments feature is completely free of charge, and does not even require creating a password. 

It goes without saying that because Messenger now support payments for group chats, users can now make full use of it especially in collecting monetary contributions for a purchase (like for a group gift for a wedding, for instance). Before this feature, people often instead take full advantage of other standalone payment brands, such as PayPal, Venmo, or Square Cash.

Facebook has made no secret about its ambitions to become more than just a social media platform. Thus, it has integrated loads of new features in the last few years. Payments, however, remains an area that it has not concentrated much on recently, which is interesting because the company after all is in a good position to be able to gather payment information for its super massive customer base. But with its new feature, it appears that the company is beginning to work on that area.