Facebook Payments – A Potential New Way to Manufacture Spend

A few days ago there was a report that Facebook was preparing their mobile messaging app to also have a friend-to-friend payment feature built in. Being the points-addict that I am, my mind immediately started thinking of the manufactured spend opportunities this might present.

All we can do is speculate about it at this point since there hasn’t been any formal announcement about this feature from Facebook yet, but there are few different models that can be followed:

• PayPal: Allows person-to-person payments but takes a transaction fee. Allows loads via reload packs sold at select stores.
• Square Cash: There are possibilities to MS with Square cash, but not many people take advantage. Some are listed in this post, while other hints are dropped in the FlyerTalk thread. The guy who found this potential new Facebook feature speculates that it will be like Square Cash.
• Amazon Payments: Up to $1K free per month on credit cards. Recently ended this program, so a replacement would be very timely!

This Gizmodo article mentions that Facebook hired an ex-PayPal President to be the head of Facebook Messenger, so I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the model they follow. The most likely scenario in my mind is that Facebook offers a promotional period where people can transfer a certain number of dollars for free, then a fee would apply to all transactions after that. This is what Google did with their new payment service as well…but with any luck, it’ll follow the Amazon model and just be free every month.

The good news in all of this is that the person that uncovered this potential new feature saw some coding that specifically referred to credit cards, so at least we’ll know that some level of this would be possible. Perhaps we’ll see Facebook Reload cards coming to a 5% cash back store near us ;).

I’ll be sure to update everyone if there are further developments with this feature. You can see the original poster’s tweet here.