Facebook is expanding its peer to peer payments service to groups. The company first introduced the service in 2015 and started allowing people to transact funds to each other via messenger. Considering the wide audience its messenger service enjoys, it was a pretty apt addition. The company is now seeking to capitalize further and will now allow people to conduct transactions even withing groups. The long and short of the matter is this: Users can now pay individual members, as well as everyone in a particular group or even ask them to chip in, quickly and easily.
Announcing the feature, the company said:
Starting today for Android and desktop, you can send or receive money between groups of people on Messenger. It’s free, simple, fast and secure. Whether you’re splitting a restaurant bill or chipping in for a group gift, all you need to do is go to a new or existing Messenger group conversation to get started.
To make use of this service, simply tap the plus sign in the bottom left hand side of the group conversation. You will find the option for group payments tucked somewhere there. The company said that the feature could prove to be acutely useful in situations when the whole group is contributing towards something. So for instance, say you want to buy a gift for a buddy who is having his or her birthday later in the month. What do you do? Create a Facebook group and ask everyone to chip in of course.
To do so, simply enter the amount you want to request per person. You can also enter the total amount you want from the group and it will automatically be divided equally among everyone. What’s more, every time someone pays, a message appears in the group so that keeping track of who has paid and who has not is as easy as scrolling upwards in the chat.
This feature can also work in situations where you want to send money to each and every member of the group simultaneously. Simply enter the amount you want to send and chose the people at the receiving end.
Facebook is betting big on payments. After all, transactions are an area that can yield dozens of ways of generating revenue. And when you have a audience like Facebook properties — such as WhatsApp or Messenger — possess, payments are almost a must-have. Particularly since a significant portion of this audience is already Internet savvy and wouldn’t need much convincing in order to jump upon the payments bandwagon. The social networking platform has been making in-roads in the direction and recently, reports that it was thinking about debuting payments on WhatsApp in India also came to the surface.
Watch the new group payments feature in action right below:
