You Can Now Send Your Mates Money Using Facebook Messenger

Facebook has quickly become, to all intents and purposes, the only place that you need to use online for almost all your social and professional needs.

It can seem daunting to have one technology company controlling your entire life, but for those who are happy to roll with the convenience, we've got news for you now: it's just gone up a notch.

Credit: PA

You can now use Facebook Messenger to send money to your friends, whether you owe them or if you just want to help them out.

Before this change was introduced you could only send £250 ($328) at a time to friends in the same country as you, but Facebook hopes that people can eventually use the feature to pay businesses too.

'With P2P [peer-to-peer] payments, this paves the path to us enabling small and large businesses to accept payments inside of Messenger," said David Marcus, who leads Facebook's Messenger team.

"A lot of public services require a form of conversation so if you can do it in the form of Messenger and add payments on top of things, I think it would be a really good customer experience."

And you'll no doubt be delighted to learn that it's very easy to use.

All you need to do is link your debit or credit card to your Messenger account, choose the amount of money you want to send over and press send. That's pretty much it.

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You'll also be asked to set and enter a pin number so your mates can't cheekily send themselves the money for a round while you're in the pub bogs.

All in all, it sounds very similar to PayPal, except you'll never have to leave Facebook's warm, familiar cocoon.

You will also need to link your debit card to Messenger if you'd like to receive money from your friends - and who wouldn't?

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All in all, the new service sounds deceptively simple, which means that we'll probably all be using it in no time at all.

It's a win-win situation: Facebook continues its relentless quest to take over the universe, and you'll eventually get to recklessly blow all your money on shite while you're drunk - without needing to change service.

If that isn't a promising prospect to keep with you throughout the day, I don't know what is. What a time to be alive.

Featured Image Credit: PA

Topics: Phones and Gadgets, Facebook, Technology

Chris Ogden

Chris Ogden is a journalist at LADbible. He graduated from the University of East Anglia with degrees in English Literature and Creative Writing before completing his NCTJ Diploma in Multimedia Journalism. Chris has previously written for the independent culture magazine The Skinny, among other publications.

@TheThumbCompass