Facebook To Discontinue Messenger Payments In The UK And France

Facebook Messenger does allow peer-to-peer payments but that’s no longer going to be possible in two major markets. The company has confirmed that it’s going to discontinue peer-to-peer Messenger payments in the United Kingdom and France later this year. It says that active users will be notified of the change in due course.

The company confirmed to Engadget that it has made the decision to discontinue Messenger payments in the United Kingdom and France on June 15. “After evaluating how we give people the best experiences in Messenger, we made the decision to focus our efforts on experiences that people find most useful,” it said.

This opens the door to the possibility that Facebook might shift to its own cryptocurrency for money transfers through Messenger. The digital currency is said to be in development for WhatsApp and is reportedly tied to the U.S. dollar. It should thus be more resistant to the extreme volatility that has been seen with other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin over the past year.

Facebook introduced this service back in 2015 as a way of easily sending money to your friends on the social network. You could thus pay your share of the dinner bill using a credit or debit card through Messenger payments. It later added the option to make payments through PayPal as well. The company hasn’t said if it has plans to discontinue the service in any other market.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Cellphones
Tags: Facebook, facebook messenger