
Send Money to Friends in Messenger - iceron
http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2015/03/send-money-to-friends-in-messenger/
======
6stringmerc
"Hey _RELATIVE_ it's me here on Facebook I had to get a new account because
I'm in trouble here in _FOREIGN COUNTRY_ so please send me money. It's really
easy and I need it bad! Just enter your credit card and I will be saved!"

I know, I know, it's not the tool...but I am reminded of a certain scene from
The Fifth Element...

"I hate warriors, too narrow-minded. I'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've immediately
asked about the little red button on the bottom of the gun. "

~~~
cek
Kindel's Law: "Every new payment system rapidly transforms into an anti-fraud
system."

~~~
joshmn
Even lower-level, anything consumable by, well, anyone, quickly transforms
from add-to-cart, checkout, and ship (whether digitally or physically), to
add-to-cart, checkout, make sure they're actually the cardholder and
legitimately authorizing the purchase, ship.

I have seen far too many places -- whether they're side projects, smb, or even
enterprises -- completely miss the antifraud step. There are companies like
MaxMind who <help identify and somewhat prevent this> but for someone who is
above average-intelligence and an apt "carder", it's so trivial to get around.

When I'm tasked by x company -- a bank, company, security team, or someone
with a side project -- to run through their site and try to get an order
shipped using false credentials, I can't even speak to how easy it is for me
to do so with trivial effort. And it's not all fun to see.

There is a company who does gift cards, and they'd ship them out instantly.
Once redeemed by the other merchant, bam, they're SOL.

Don't be this company. Don't be this entrepreneur. Don't be this hacker. Reach
out to someone who knows what they're doing. If your business relies on
conducting transactions, I don't care if it's flowers or dog leashes, or some
shit that's going to end up on Shark Tank, you need to have anti-fraud in
place.

~~~
tajen
Sorry for my ignorance but what are possible anti-fraud rules for, say, a
flower merchant?

~~~
espadrine
Depending on how often the merchant is bitten by fraud, they can require to
see an ID card for certain types of transaction (such as cash or check), or
raise prices to cover the fraud costs.

Generally, they try to ensure that the liability shift is on the bank's side,
by using an EMV capable system for most payments. Of course, that usually
requires them to have a specific contract; banks, on their side, perform a
risk assessment to ensure that they won't be covering too much fraud.

------
zacharypinter
At this point, I just want one of these pay-with-your-phone solutions to win
and be ubiquitous.

The current situation is almost comical. "Do you have Venmo? Haven't set that
up yet, can you send over Paypal?. No, what about Square Wallet? Nope, what
about Gmail?"

~~~
astazangasta
It's bizzare that our financial sector is the largest area of the economy and
yet has not managed to produce any innovation in this regard. Shouldn't banks
be giving us easy ways to transfer money? Isn't this their function? Financial
services?

~~~
Mister_Snuggles
Here in Canada, I can do an email money transfer to virtually any financial
institution. All the recipient needs to do is bank with one that supports it
and use online banking.

I don't know how innovative it is, but it works relatively well.

[https://www.interac.ca/en/interac-etransfer/etransfer-
detail](https://www.interac.ca/en/interac-etransfer/etransfer-detail)

~~~
josho
Yes, Canada is ahead. On the other hand that email money transfer incurs a
transaction fee from most banks.

What pisses me off is that we have a nearly ubiquitous way to send money in
the physical world--a cheque. Yet, in the digital world we stumble to achieve
the same.

I blame the profit driven corporations as each solution incurs a transaction
fee and/or a proprietary solution with no interop with other systems.

My experience doing B2B money transfers: For those out of country I paid a
$25-50 fee to do a wire transfer. Meanwhile bank transfers within Canada
required a cash withdrawal (or bank draft), followed by a trip to the other
bank to perform the deposit. Sigh.

~~~
voltagex_
I'll be staying in BC for a while this year. It's the first time I've
seriously looked at Bitcoin to transfer money from Australia. The problem I
have is the fees are from both sides - the Australian bank and the Canadian
one.

Has anyone tried TransferWise?

~~~
tajen
I've used OzForex for $20k. Deeply satisfied.

------
FreakyT
It'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.

On a related note, this continues Facebook's unfortunate user-interface
decision to replace the simple "send" button in Facebook Messenger with a row
of increasingly crowded and not-particularly-useful buttons to send various
"other" things.

~~~
kamilszybalski
Why is it unlikely that enough people will add their card information to
Facebook?

~~~
ddoolin
I'm curious, too. Given that they have hundreds of millions of users and most
(that I know) don't seem to care one way or the other about the privacy
implications, I don't see usage being an issue at all.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Agreed, the network effect works seriously in FB's favour here. Do I add my
payment details and get back the £20 an acquaintance sent me or do I wait
until I see them and hope we both remember?

Once you're signed up then FB have dropped the barrier to making further
payments with their platform, which presumably is the purpose of this from
their point of view.

------
Kronopath
It'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's WeChat.

And it's used _extensively_ 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 _incredibly_
popular—I even received one myself from a Chinese friend.

I wouldn't underestimate the potential popularity of this move. Especially
once they open this up to countries outside the US.

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

~~~
cwilson
If I were Facebook I'd require anyone using the Pay feature to turn on two
factor authentication.

~~~
serve_yay
Yes, they should do that. And I can't think of anything more annoying than
needing to receive a text, just so I can log into dumb old Facebook. (I
realize there are other "factors" available but that's not really the point.)

~~~
evanspa
Or, they could do it lazily. I.e., only force the 2FA at the time of money
send / receive.

------
ChikkaChiChi
I skimmed through the comments and thought "What is Venmo and how terrible am
I for not knowing about it sooner?"

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.

No offense to those who enjoy Venmo and its services, but this thread is a
great example of HN commentary echo; it's way louder in here than it actually
is.

~~~
ceras
Among the disjoint groups of my own friends and my girlfriends' friends (none
of whom code or are tech savvy at all), everyone I know in NYC uses Venmo. I
learned about it from non-tech people. It could be because Venmo advertised
_very_ heavily in NYC mass transit a long time ago.

My friends in the Bay Area, in contrast, are far less likely to know about
Venmo and either use none of these options or are pretty fragmented.

YMMV, of course :) it just seems like Venmo has done really well in one
particularly large market, and the other ones are still way more fragmented.

~~~
ChikkaChiChi
That sounds perfectly reasonable and I could totally believe it. Many of these
services seem to have an adoption in NYC or SF that may not be representative
of other areas.

------
stephen-mw
The thing I don't like about this is that I'm forced to become Facebook
friends with someone to send or receive money. That's an unnecessary layer of
consideration.

I want to send and receive money quickly, easily, and cheaply. Now I'm also
seeing what Ted is up to on my news feed. He's my Facebook friend now because
we were all at a restaurant last week and they didn't let us split the bill.

~~~
meplusplus
I don't think you need to be friends with a person in order to do this. You
can send normal messages to users who are not friends so I think payment will
also have this ability.

------
ForHackernews
The only reason this "problem" remains to be solved is that the US banking
industry can'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's a good story contrasting the UK system with the US:
[http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/10/04/229224964/episode-...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/10/04/229224964/episode-489-the-
invisible-plumbing-of-our-economy)

Expect all of these virtual wallet payment systems to die a swift death once
Visa/Mastercard/Citi/Bank Of America/Chase finally pulls their finger out.

------
bobsky
A natural addition. And just like Square Cash, just enter bank issued debit
card for fee-free transactions.

Now if it would work outside the US and in-between different countries, that'd
be the killer app. Is there anything close to that dream?

~~~
dvcc
How often do international transactions actually occur though (for small
payments between friends)? I feel like it is such a small market it probably
is not worth the extra hassle from a legal/fraud standpoint.

As for outside the US, I was under the impression that most banks provide a
free service for these transactions.

~~~
guelo
Remittances are one of the largest capital flows to developing countries
totaling $400 billion in 2014.

As they say, if you could capture 1% of that market ...

~~~
foobarqux
... then you still wouldn't make much money because the margins are so low.

------
smackfu
I'm surprised they don'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.

------
billyhoffman
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'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.

~~~
differentView
>Facebook has over 1.1 billion users

People really need to stop repeating this. As someone with over 30+ Facebook
accounts (for games) and knows lots of other Facebook gaming friends with 10+
accounts as well as non-gamers who keep 2+ accounts (primary,
parents/relatives, cosplay/hobby, work, etc...). I'd discount whatever number
Facebook reports by at least 20%.

~~~
patejam
Well it's also 1.1 billion active users per month, so that makes it slightly
better IMO.

------
danso
I wonder if there's potential for this to be a content-creator-payment
platform? That is, make tipping a publication as easy as hitting a "Like" on
any given story...you could even have it as an extra button (I think making it
a default pop-up with every "Like" would be detrimental to the user
experience, to the point that users would just stop hitting "Like" for stories
they actually liked)...it wouldn't make much money for FB, perhaps, but it
would create further adoption of the platform.

Edit: Not only might it increase adoption for the payments system, but it may
further entice content creators to join FB's nascent content-platform
ambitions: [http://digiday.com/platforms/facebook-youtube-
premium/](http://digiday.com/platforms/facebook-youtube-premium/)

------
habosa
I already have a way to send money for free to any of my Facebook friends:
Venmo.

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.

I don't think Venmo does too well as a business (processing cash for free for
years can't be good business) but they have nailed the user experience.

~~~
joshstrange
I love Venmo and use it with a number of friends but I'm getting sick of the
"Do you have Venmo? No, Ok PayPal? No, Ok, well I can setup snapcash if you
have it setup? No, ever heard of square cash?....." As much as I hate caving
into the "Almighty Book of Faces" I will probably enter my card to help
facilitate payments with friends. I use Venmo to pay my parents for loans in
their name, for my sisters sorority dues, for pizza, beer, etc. I will keep
Venmo for sure and prefer it over FB Pay but I'm really worried FB is going to
kill Venmo with this move....

------
zobzu
I wonder who doesnt have his pay service yet.

Id rather use bitcoin.

------
salimmadjd
Now I see why they hired former paypal guys, David Marcus [1] and Stan
Chudnovsky [2]

Although I'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.

1: [https://www.linkedin.com/in/dmarcus](https://www.linkedin.com/in/dmarcus)

2:
[https://www.linkedin.com/in/stanchudnovsky](https://www.linkedin.com/in/stanchudnovsky)

------
Jake232
I think it'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.

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.

It's an interesting development of recent years for sure.

~~~
TheSoftwareGuy
I mean, in reality, we are just back where we started. cash & checkbooks used
to do this very well, until people needed online payments.

~~~
berdon
Not really. Cash and checkbooks require you pulling out a some form of tender,
divvying out the correct amount or writing the amount out, and then handing
the tender to the cashier.

Now, using Uber as an example, I request a car, get into the car, and leave
the car. You never even need to open the app back up after requesting a car.

------
Balgair
The old jwz quote: "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail.
Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. "

And the Cargill corollary: "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 "

------
devy
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's WeChat(aka Weixin) and Weibo during
this year's Chinese's new year and giving and receiving red envelop money via
digital wallet became a new way of Chinese social phenomena.

------
yesplorer
Facebook on the shutting down of their email service:

 _" It seems wrong that an email message from your best friend gets sandwiched
between a bill and a bank statement," the company wrote in its announcement
blog post for the feature. The service didn't catch on, perhaps in part
because Facebook never truly created a friendly or familiar interface for
emailing._ [0]

In much the same vain, wouldn't it be that users wouldn'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?

This is going to be a whole new level of friends/family and money don't get on
pretty well. Maybe just me though.

[0] [http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/24/5443454/facebook-
retires-i...](http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/24/5443454/facebook-retires-its-
email-service)

~~~
EarthLaunch
That possibility a really good point. It gives a lot of people, whether they
owe or are owed, a strong reason to avoid actively using FB, the same way
people avoid logging into chat because they don't want to feel obligated to
chat with certain people. People who owe will feel guilty and not want to
appear, while people who are owed will feel angry that they're not being paid
back when it's so simple.

------
adriancooney
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't enabled Pay and they nag until friend Y does sign up. The
cycle will continue. It's probably part of a bigger venture into eCommerce for
Facebook.

~~~
brettfarrow
I think they're aiming to enable people to buy from ads without ever leaving
Facebook. Reduces friction for the buyer and has the potential to be a major
source of revenue from ecommerce companies.

I'm sure they realize how much money Google is printing with their shopping
campaigns, and FB ads haven't proven to be very rewarding for ecommerce
outside of fashion/lifestyle. Adding a major feature like that would be
enormous in grabbing some of that market.

~~~
shostack
Can't upvote hard enough.

User-to-user is just one piece of the puzzle. Facebook has faced a REAL uphill
battle convincing advertisers of the value they add in the path to conversion.
Anyone who is familiar with cross-channel attribution knows this all to well.
Many of FB's recent updates have been big slaps in the face to many
advertisers, but this could be a huge win.

It would in essence enable them to go from being what is typically one of the
first points in the "generating awareness" stage to being a last touch
success. Most advertisers are not savvy to things like attribution (hence one
of the reasons AdWords still focuses on last click in their main UI), so being
able to say to businesses "here is how much money you earned directly and
immediately from your ad" is a huge win for proving the value they add.

Any PMs or engineers at FB--would love to chat with you about this and how it
ties into the attribution picture. Seriously--it's a huge problem for you
right now.

------
sjbase
A lot of people are commenting about Facebook being "yet another entrant" into
the wallet & payment game. I'd enjoy the ease and simplicity of having
everyone on a single payment platform as much as the next guy, but it's simply
not realistic. There's too much at stake for Google, Apple, Paypal, Square
etc. to just give up.

Instead, I could see this taking a similar direction as web authentication:
instead of "Login with Google+" or "Login with Facebook" buttons, you have
"Send $ to Google Wallet" in your FB-pay interface.

I'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.

~~~
shostack
It also makes sense for businesses to consider them as a payment option given
the reach, and if it takes off, the likelihood that a user will keep their
payment details current.

Expired credit card churn is a huge issue for any successful SaaS business,
and someone is much more likely to keep their payment details updated with a
service they pay through regularly than they are entering one-off CC info.
Adding FB to the mix with Apple, Amazon, Paypal and Google would make sense
for a lot of companies (although probably entails a whole host of headaches).

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

~~~
BinaryIdiot
Depending on the arbitrary counting methodology you want to use you could
easily say this is the same amount of steps. For your physical wallet you take
wallet out, you get money, you swipe, you sign. For Facebook the first time
you open a chat with your friend, you click button, get wallet out, you enter
information, you enter amount, you send. The subsequent times it's you opening
a chat with your friend, clicking the button, entering the amount, sending.

I'm just trying to illustrate that the amount of steps required is arbitrary
and doesn't really indicate security. Sure feeling uncomfortable is fine but
at least this way is safer than a physical wallet simply because you can't
have your cards or cash stolen and worst case your phone is stolen you can
login on a computer and deauthorize the phone (plus you can use a pin).

~~~
josephschmoe
I'm assuming I would already be in a Facebook conversation with the person, so
the number of steps would be relatively low. Without that assumption, Facebook
is (mildly) more difficult than a physical wallet.

------
serve_yay
I use Square cash sometimes and I think it's pretty good, I don't think I
would use this. A Facebook account is already a target for hacking, let alone
bringing payment info into the situation.

If a friend had this but didn't have Square, that wouldn't be enough to sway
me to put my CC in Facebook. I just don't think I can bring myself to do that.

------
S_A_P
I believe this was called project 419 internally.

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

------
linux_devil
"Need a ultra-secured phoned with 2 level authentication on messages "

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 ?

~~~
tagx
You can add a PIN that you need to enter every time you try to send money

------
ajessup
It would be interesting if a user'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.

~~~
warkdarrior
There are companies that already do this:
[http://money.cnn.com/2013/08/26/technology/social/facebook-c...](http://money.cnn.com/2013/08/26/technology/social/facebook-
credit-score/index.html)

------
msoad
It's interesting that the B-Roll video is not hosted on Facebook.

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's available.

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

~~~
smackfu
It's debit card not credit card, so usually they just pay a small flat fee of
a couple of cents. Small enough to not pass on to the customer.

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

~~~
taterbase
Venmo uses actual ACH transactions which are free, it's like writing a check
but there is a delay. FB, Snapchat, and others are likely eating the cost of
the debit card "swipe" in hopes of garnering users.

~~~
pbz
Do they somehow find the ACH info (bank account) from the debit card?

------
turingbook
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.

------
xasos
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.

------
sk24iam
I wouldn'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/Touch ID.

------
Fiahil
Introducing Snapcash!
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBwjxBmMszQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBwjxBmMszQ)

~~~
nacs
10K likes to 13K dislikes on that video and comments now disabled.

Guess that indicates how much people like Snapcash.

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

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

------
ngoel36
Did they build out this technology themselves, or was it through an
acquisition?

On a side note - no AmEx or Bank Account option...

------
nichochar
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

------
deftnerd
Any news if this will be opened up through one of their Developer API's?

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

------
benbristow
> This feature will be rolling out over the coming months in the US.

Fucking typical.

------
mmagin
Oh, yes, like I'm going to give FB my credit card info.

------
richardlblair
What's funny about this is that this happens to be snapchat's monetization
strategy, too. It's funny because FB wanted to buy snapchat, snapchat said no,
and now FB has implemented their strategy.

I'm amused.

------
gesman
Finally, i can satisfy the urge to send money to friends.

Seriously?

------
Freeboots
Far from the first person to mention it, but im fairly sure we have had this
for a while.

[http://i.imgur.com/lczQmNQ.png](http://i.imgur.com/lczQmNQ.png)

------
kgc
Deleting Square Cash and Paypal...

------
curiously
"Dear Sir/Madam,"

"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."

------
dsugarman
does this say something about how fast snapchat is innovating?

~~~
tonyhb
Considering we've had Venmo[1], wallet/gmail[2] and Square Cash[3] since 2013,
not really.

[1]: [http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/20/after-2-years-in-
be...](http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/20/after-2-years-in-beta-venmo-
opens-payment-service-to-public/)

[2]: [http://googlecommerce.blogspot.com/2013/05/send-money-to-
fri...](http://googlecommerce.blogspot.com/2013/05/send-money-to-friends-with-
gmail-and.html)

[3]: [http://allthingsd.com/20131015/the-money-is-in-the-
email/](http://allthingsd.com/20131015/the-money-is-in-the-email/)

~~~
dsugarman
which of these were a way to send money through a social network's chat
client?

~~~
SyncTheory13
SnapCash and SquareCash are one & the same. I think it's a great convenience
to add CC to my FB, but since I do not use a real name, do not trust FB, and
would be concerned about my account being compromised (though it probably
makes you enter a CSC/PIN), I will not be using this any time in the near
future.

I personally use SquareCash all the time, and also use PNC bank's
complimentary POPmoney setup to transfer funds for free (with PNC, I scheduled
a partial rent payment to go to my landlord's bank account automatically every
paycheck).

