Are Mobile Payments Coming To Facebook Messenger?

With WeChat and Line waiting just around the corner to steal its thunder, Messenger needs to start showing what it’s capable of as a platform. There have been several indications of this, but nothing game-changing just yet. Now, there are rumours that Facebook is about to release some new features on Messenger – Payments for products and services, and some nifty new chat features.

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Facebook could be gearing up to roll out new Messenger features, like in-store payment for goods and services and new chat options. In the code of Messenger for the iPhone, developers have spotted references to payments through the app as well as a new “secret conversations” option (whatever that means is anyone’s guess).

You might be able to use Messenger for in-store payments pretty soon

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This is slightly strange, because Mark Zuckerberg has denied that the company was going to turn Messenger into a payment processor. It does however look like Facebook wants to take on Google and Apple for mobile payments. More specifically, he had said

[quote]We don’t view ourselves as a payments business, that’s not the type of company that we are,[/quote]

The “secret conversations” feature is another mystery that Facebook is so far being very quiet about. We have no point of reference other than the fact that WhatsApp, an app owned by Facebook is moving into encrypted chat territory. Could this be the same on Messenger? In any case, the above are rumours and we can only assume that they are far off from being released for the time-being.

Image Credit: Mirror Daily