F5.5G Leap-forward Development of Broadband in Africa The Africa Broadband Forum 2024 (BBAF 2024) was successfully held in Cape Town, South Africa recently, under…
Facebook Messenger could enable you to send money to your friends
Sending a few Dollars or Rands to friends on Facebook could become as easy as sending them a bikini-clad selfie.
According to a report by TechCrunch, Stanford University student Andrew Aude has uncovered a whole bunch of juicy code in Facebook Messenger that shows the social network looking to add a peer-to-peer money transfer feature in the future.
After fiddling around with Messenger using a jailbroken iPhone, the student managed to unlock the feature. Here’s a video of how it looks:
The report found that the feature doesn’t actually charge a transfer fee and only works with debit cards and not credit cards. If that’s the case, it could help tackle Africa’s estimated US$60-billion remittance industry.
The P2P money transfer feature could however include a PayPal payment option. Since June this year, PayPal President David Marcus has been hired to run Facebook’s messaging department.
The social network broke its messaging app away from the original Facebook app earlier in August this year. The move was rather controversial, to say the least. Users were confused if not creeped out by the seemingly invasive Terms & Conditions. Now we might know why the conditions are so strict.
The world’s biggest social network could also roll-out its payment feature to other apps like WhatsApp and Instagram, which the company also owns.
