Facebook Messenger adds another notch to its belt with its newest PayPal integration.
Over the past few years, PayPal has struck deals with MasterCard, Visa, Vodafone, Alibaba and others in a an attempt to expand into the consumer payments landscape. Venture Beat reports that a collaboration with Facebook Messenger opens PayPal up to a potential one billion users.
This seems like a match made in heaven however, as Facebook has also been building up the enterprise side of Messenger, opening up the platform to online shopping and customer service bots.
Initially, the service will only be available to a small portion of the United States. PayPal users will soon be able to link their PayPal and Messenger accounts and they’ll receive payment notifications directly within the app.
Facebook and PayPal have collaborated in the past. Last year, PayPal subsidiary Braintree, Facebook and Uber partnered to allow customers to use hail and pay for an Uber from Messenger. Furthermore, merchants already signed up on Messenger will be able to accept PayPal payments through their bots.
Users will see, in Facebook’s Help Centre, that PayPal is now listed as one of the payments options accepted on Messenger as well as credit cards, debit cards, prepaid cards, reloadable prepaid cards, government-issued bank cards and preloaded healthcare flexible spending cards.
Bill Ready, the executive vice president and COO of PayPal wrote a statement for the company’s official website about the deal.
“We will continue to execute on our vision of offering PayPal in more places where people shop online, in app and in store by partnering with companies who share our desire to create meaningful products that benefit both consumers and merchants.”
We reached out to Facebook Canada for comment, who informed MobileSyrup that there are no plans to expand this feature to Canada at this time.
Related: PayPal Canada to move offices to Toronto’s MaRS Discovery District
[source]PayPal[/source]
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