Facebook is rolling out a new feature to let you send your friends money through its chat app Messenger, the company announced Tuesday.
Facebook Messenger users in the US will soon start seeing a dollar-sign icon in the app. Just tap the icon, enter the amount of money you want to send, and viola!
Enabling peer-to-peer money transfer has become increasingly hot in the startup world. Snapchat lets users send money to each other using Snapcash, Venmo is an app solely dedicated to that idea, and Google, PayPal, and Square all have their own offerings, too.
Facebook assures users that its new service will be safe and secure — the company already processes more than one million transactions every day for game purchases and advertising products.
While Venmo is "on fire" and gaining traction on college campuses, Snapcash seems like it's been slower to take off, according to a survey Business Insider did with a bunch of millennials about their Snapchat usage. Part of Snapchat's problem, we heard, was that people don't trust the app with their financial information. Because Facebook is a bigger, more established company that has a lot of experience handling money, it's product might be able to win over more users.
