By the end of 2016 the Central Bank of Ireland granted the license to Facebook Payments International Limited (FBPIL). This finally enables the entity to issue money, to provide payment services including: money transfers, payment transactions, international payments and refunds.
With this new functionality, Facebook is going to make social commerce evolve once again. Much more impulse purchases are likely to take place. Indeed, with the absence of credit card information needed users would be less attached to the purchase process.This ingenious feature is already very useful to companies like Amazon and Google wallet.
How do Facebook Payments work?
Already functioning in the US, the messenger bots can collect payments with no need to send users to an external website. For these peer-to-peer payment features, the Messenger the app uses the credit card information that users have already stored in. To offer the service, the company is working with all the major banking and credit card players in the industry.
This Irish license applies to all 27 European Union member states which will benefit any of its cross border e-commerce stores willing to adopt these new features.
What’s next?
Certainly, e-commerce will benefit from these new functionalities and such thing as a travel bot could, for example, help travelers find and book flight tickets and hotels, besides indicating itineraries right in the Facebook Messenger app.
But Facebook has bigger plans to come for the future. It want to turn Messenger into a real marketplace by adding a number of functionalities which would include in-store payments. Facebook is not about to stop its ever-growing development.