I can’t think of another company I’d want less to know my transaction and purchase history than FB/Meta. What happened to Zuckerberg’s shift to “video” or are they truly throwing anything and everything at the wall now?
E-commerce (mostly for IG) and payments (mostly for WA, somewhat for Messenger) have been parts of the Facebook bull case for a long time. Why do people think companies of >70k people can't focus on more than one product/service? Not you in particular, just generally, I spend more time than I'd like to admit on "fin-Twit" and people expect FB has suddenly buried every plan aside of VR since they rebranded. I would say however the spaghetti analogy is a bit dismissive considering that, when their projects do "stick to the wall", they spawn business-lines with 10 digit users.
Not that I have any objection to the hive mind thinking Reels and VR is the end-all be-all, I want it to think it's a dead business.
WeChat Pay (Tencent) and AliPay (Alibaba) are both huge indeed. I have no clue how much cash they bring in, tho I would expect Visa and Mastercard make way more, but they are widely used, especially the former (WeChat is quite the super-app in China)
The reason why they would want this, in my interpretation anyway, is that there is a lot of product fit to have payments on WhatsApp. The app is widely used outside NA as the communication channel, namely by lots of SMBs that actively use it (see [0], that app is solely used for business owners as it's rather useless for a regular WA user). The monetizing opportunities on WA are deeply tied to SMBs, basically you should be able to operate a business on WA in which case you shouldn't have to go off-app once you get to payment, removing payment-middlemen is probably in the interest of all three parties involved too. Payments are necessary to enable "business over chat", you can also see them working on this with Click-to-WhatsApp/Click-to-Messenger ads and the acquisition of Kustomer. This is all valid for Messenger as well but I think that's more of a TBD, it's yet to prove itself popular for that kind of usage, tho there is a good fit for Marketplace and to compete with Venmo. It's also implemented on Facebook and Instagram for their respective Shops platforms, I don't think there's more to it than that for those.
Just like Apple Pay is a rounding error[1], I wouldn't bet on payments being a significant cash cow, not any time soon anyway, considering Facebook's approach to monetization. IMO it's more about deepening the moat and broadening the utility of the apps, especially WhatsApp as it tries to become something of a communication+commerce+payments super-app for Asia/Latam/Africa (credit cards and phone numbers would be rough to displace in North America and Europe, I sure as hell wouldn't bet on FB overtaking those). A Signal or a Telegram could take over a chatting app (if it somehow reaches, like, 2B people), it would be much harder (as if it wasn't hard enough to beat such a network effect) to take over a chatting app with a built-in suite of features for businesses and a user base that gets accustomed to commercial use of said app.
I could also be entirely wrong, I'm just an idiot that tries to follow the company.
I figured I'd point out why you're (probably) being downvoted in case you don't understand. The problem of payments is obvious, it's literally ancient. It's a ridiculous and naive statement that anyone would have to look at WeChat to realize it's a valuable problem to solve.
My feed is full of former groups being overrun with blogspam. I've noticed it spiking in the last 3-6 months. That type of thing needs armies of people, and... well, facebook doesn't care.
Like the pre-google (well, and google search as of now) search engines, being overrun by spam signaled the end of the viability of the product. Either they don't have the resources to defend it, or they don't care. Reason doesn't matter.
The terrible thing is is that it's the easiest solution for me and my friend group to send money via Messenger.
The US has _really_ dropped the ball on any sort of easy-to-use, standardized money transfer. Zelle is the closest thing and it is a joke for every day usability.
Personal opinion: significantly. FedNow instant payments are a penny for up to $100k transfers, with the eventual plan to support up to $500k transfers.
I don't see how it would impact Apple Pay, for example. In Australia, we have instant payments already, and Apple/Google/Samsung Pay is used alongside it - completely separate.
since we are talking consumers here, what would it look like to a regular user? would I have to walk around asking people for their account numbers and routing numbers to FedNow them the money?
If it’s anything like Canada’s INTERAC e-transfers, you ask for the person’s email address; they receive an email bouncing them to a SAML sign-on portal with support for all major banks, which lets them use their bank to SSO into the payment system; and then the payment system uses the SSO-reflected banking details as the destination for depositing the money.
INTERAC now lets you set up auto deposit - simply go to your bank’s online banking portal and register your email and from then on any incoming transactions go to whatever account you chose. Very handy! No more “security questions”
They’re also rolling out support for phone numbers as identifiers in addition to email addresses but my bank doesn’t seem to support sending to phone numbers (or registering mine as auto deposit) yet.
It will eventually support aliases (like Zelle does) as well as cross border payments, but my understanding is that it won’t at launch (as the desire is to get the ACH delays gone first). I don’t have consumer UX insight, only into the ISO20022 message plumbing (user->institution->Fed->institution->user).
In India, we have UPI and other forms of instant transaction system (all of them are free in any decent bank, I believe).
With UPI, you can connect your bank account (no matter which bank it is) with any UPI based payment app and create IDs which can be shared for receiving or requesting payments. (These IDs are unique on basis of both app and bank).
So I can connect my bank account to gpay and create a new ID. Send them to others who are using gpay or any other UPI app (bank apps also have UPI functionality built in). They can send the payment to the ID (which will be automatically added to my bank). This is instant.
It can also be used for requesting payment by others and I can accept or decline the request.
Alternatively, phone numbers can also be used to fetch the IDs a person has if you have enabled it (it's by default)
In the UK (and I believe all of Europe), the system is indeed based on bank account numbers and sort codes, but popular banking apps like Monzo will do WhatsApp-style contact lists, where banking details of your phone contacts are synced and you can just pick them from the list (note: account number are not considered secret sensitive information). Banking apps will usually save someone’s details for future usage.
That's definitely a down side to it. I think you used to be able to choose your username, but now the only options my bank gives me are name + surname, first initial + surname or, oddly, middle name + surname
What if someone don't use Messenger? Venmo/Paypal are still the most popular options in my circles, largely because they are not tied to any specific platform.
Since they're all owned by a company with an extremely polarizing public opinion, I imagine the reasons someone might not use one of them would likely double as reasons not to use the others, either.
The small print is scary, at least compared to a service like PayPal. There's absolutely no consumer protection unless you're actually buying something from Facebook themselves, and for any kind of returns or refunds the advice given is "contact your bank".
At least compared to PayPal?! PayPal refused to help with a fraudulent short term rental payment. Thank God that I paid through PayPal with a credit card and the credit card company helped. Horrible company.
When something wants to be involved in financial transactions and it can be described as "scary" compared to PayPal, you've engineered a problem. PayPal has a history of being customer hostile and withholding funds without notice. I don't plan to read the FB TOS because I have a hard block in place for them but that's a pretty damning statement.
LOL. Reminds me when I got scammed paying for something with my card through Cash app. Even though they identified that I had got ripped off their support script had a bug that would not allow them to refund me, so they said it was easier just to terminate my account.
> To keep your information secure, your debit and credit card numbers are encrypted for safe and secure storage. This information won’t be shared with sellers.
> With Facebook Pay, you can create a PIN or use your device's face or fingerprint recognition to confirm payments. Learn how to set up a PIN for Facebook Pay.
> For transactions you make with Facebook Pay, you’ll receive payment confirmation details in an email. If you see a transaction you don’t recognize, please contact your bank or financial institution.
And
> Is there Purchase Protection for online shopping?
> Purchases made through third-party sites, local pickups, Messenger transactions, or through other messaging services don't qualify for Purchase Protection. Learn more about how Purchase Protection works on Facebook.
That's the same way that Venmo (or any of the other p2p payments) work (though I guess Venmo has a specific "opt in to some extra protection for a fee").
Payments are regulated by financial regulation in many countries, no matter the fine print.
For EU countries this would probably be governed by the PSD2 payment services directive and the GDPR data protection.
Specifically, payment transaction data may reveal personal data and using it for other purposes than the payment itself would require explicit consent.
IANAL. It would be interesting if lawyers with up to data knowledge on financial regulations in various jurisdictions could elaborate on this.
Because other companies that offer similar services offer this feature, and thats why people use it and trust it. Paypal is very buyer focused as opposed to seller focused. Eg. if you buy something on ebay and you don't get the product or its defective or its fraud, paypal reverses the tx and puts the onus on the seller to prove you wrong.
This doesn't matter so much when sending money to friends, but an expected use case people imagine for facebook based p2p tx is fb marketplace, where you can buy things from random people online. A lot of fraud and sketchy behavior already happens there (eg. buying stolen products). Not being able to have easy reversion of such tx is bad for buyers (and good for fraudulent sellers).
Not sure if you're in the USA, but for US users, banks are pretty hands off this sort of behavior and will only reverse TX in serious fraud issues, but require the loser to pass a high bar to prove its fraud. Normal bank to bank tx is a "pull" model, so middle men services typically offer protection for the buyer to stop a "pull" in the case of fraud. Thats why the US has created many p2p services that are "push" based (eg. venmo, cash app), and why credit cards companies offer protections like charge reversal and take on that risk (you agree that you'll return money in a charge-back as a condition of VISA/etc letting you use the network).
After using Instagram a bunch, I found the targeted ads got pretty good: most were for things I was interested in, such as tech gadgets or crafts for my kids. However, clicking on an ad and buying something was so much higher friction than the rest of the mobile Instagram experience that I often just gave up.
Since then, I assumed FB must be working on some sort of payment service in order to complete the loop on the ad->purchase funnel.
Anecdotally, most of the ads for stuff I see on Instagram are scam. The products are real but the websites they were sold on just copied the images. Saw the pattern over and over again and once got burnt for trying to buy something that looked ok. (Thank god PayPal got me my money back eventually)
I don’t trust things I see in Instagram ads anymore, even if the product looks interesting
A big reason for fb to care is that it makes it easier to attribute the purchase to the add (so they can claim they should get paid more by the advertiser), which can be particularly useful to them on iOS where they can have problems tracking people from one app (where they see the ad) to an app where they pay for the thing.
It's also because most ship from aliexpress directly to your address. We stopped noticing that all of the mundane gadgets out there cost in the range of 12.99 to 19.99, whereas you buy 50 for 200 on Aliexpress
I've actually bought a lot of stuff from IG ads (and there's no other platform that I've ever clicked an ad let alone buying), but I agree with the purchase (which is off-IG anyway) to be of more friction. This can solve this problem by integrating payment into IG.
The company, which hasn't been able to figure out the UI hell of the core product for more than a decade
now must never be trusted with processing payments.
Especially when you know where the data will end up, what will happen to it next and how the company makes money (98.5% from targeted ads)
It’s really not. I’ve managed Facebook and Instagram ads for a non-profit educational group, sending Meta thousands of dollars for ad campaigns, and the UI for purchasing ads is poor, by the metric of whether the software “just works.”
There are separate webpages for creating a Facebook ad campaign (Ads Manager is one, plus there is a separate option with less features; I believe this is the Boosted posts function). The Ads Manager also displays a popup that the software might not work fi you have an ad-blocker enabled. For my devices, it’s slow and buggy in any browser except for Chrome.
The UI for managing Pages as a business is also poor. In the past (with previous Facebook Q&A forum posts documenting this), Facebook would automatically convert text posts by a Facebook page into a job listing, without asking for confirmation (!), making it unintuitive to undo. Separately, it also has limited categories for Facebook events (there is no category for educational events; the closest is the “Home” category).
Facebook has also removed certain popular features in the past, such as initially hiding, and then removing the feature to Share a post with the feature to “Keep the original post” (so only the link is shared, but not the post text that accompanied it by the original poster). The feature was lost due to a Facebook redesign, which is baffling because this reduced the likelihood of Facebook users to share content.
Maybe it’s different for larger customers (though I suspect they use the same tools), but the poor UI is frankly ridiculous for paying advertisers. Perhaps it does make sense, though; their competitor is Google Search and Display ads, which also have user interface problems (e.g. refusing to let you publish an ad set you’re willing to pay for, with very minimal messaging as to where exactly the error is, prompting multiple forum posts by other users). It’s effectively a duopoly, as other social media advertising channels are far less effective (maybe not LinkedIn, though LinkedIn is pricier), and newspaper ads are far more pricey (with higher minimum ad spend) with lower reach.
Not only that, but the amount of platforms they launched. First it was from your page, then they made a business page, then it became some ad manager, then it became facebook for business on a completely different URL. Not too mention the retooling and breaking what worked. Everytime I coached my client to work with FB ads, the system had changed again.
And that’s with the typical docs not reflecting the current state.
I guess they've reached Google-levels of product management when their payment system used across 4 products is named after only one of them. Another Hangouts in the making.
"We want to rebrand to Meta to help our image, but let's name the payment app that'll be used across all of Meta after the specific brand that's been the focus of all of that bad publicity."
Seems to be the reason. In Brazil, everyone knows what Facebook is. Very, very, very few people would know what is Meta.
How ironic is it that you need to move from a brand name to another because you have bad reputation, but still have to use the old name because even with bad reputation, it's still more trustable to handle money than your no-reputation new brand?
Hmm, I hadn't realized it was branded differently in Brazil. Still seems to align with the same idea, since WhatsApp brand recognition is at least on par with Facebook in Brazil(also, I believe most people are aware that WhatsApp is made by FB, but I guess very few recognize Meta as of now).
Maybe they are scared that something shady about it will be exposed later so they are branding it with Facebook, an already tarnished name, and keeping the Meta brand clean?
It's also available in Iraq, a place where PayPal is yet to set foot, with the growing small business sector there, it'll be interesting to see how it unfolds.
I remember being able to buy PIA tickets from USA in 2014 using my credit card somehow - I think some Pakistani bank had contracted with Verified by VISA
According to “How it Works”, it supports multiple payment methods like PayPal & Credit cards - I don’t see why UPI couldn’t just be another option on the list specifically for India.
Does Facebook, as a product, even has userbase for this?
I find it weird that they used this branding. For some time now, FB has the "old people social media" label. Also would they create a new brand (or MetaPay or whatever), some people might not connect it to Zuck's trash mentality, morality and overall creepiness.
I wouldn't be surprised if folks working at Meta consider themselves the good guys, like Google cultists do. But I was under the impression that FB->Meta name change was due to public's completely trashed opinion on Facebook.
More than half the population of Earth logged into a FB product at least once last month. They don't use it out of love or pity for Zuckerberg. They use it because they fucking love to.
And even if they don't love it they use it because they get subjective value out of that usage as these people have lots of contacts (or maybe groups) there.
I don't use FB anymore. For more than two years now. But I still keep the account as I have exactly one use case (just anecdata):
There are some very good groups on Facebook for genealogy. Here I can get help when I get stuck again.
So if I continue again with the genealogy efforts I will certainly post there again from time to time.
There are few to no comparable places on the net where I could find the appropriate help.
As someone who has resigned themself to using at least 2 FB products because I can't convince my contacts to switch because the ones who care can't convince their contacts to switch (and so on) I can tell you that we do not fucking love these products. We tolerate them with misgivings, the same way we feel when we put petrol in our cars or eat fast food
Are you referring to FB as a product or company? I have no love for Facebook nor other products of its owner, Meta, but I am not surprised that the company introduces payments.
Just that they chose to brand it as an attachment to the Facebook product. "Meta" currently operates with moral tabula rasa when it is not referred to as "FB/Meta". Facebook - in both meanings - seems to be disgraced. I was under the impression that the name change was, among other reasons, due to low reputation.
> I think you need to step outside of your bubble.
The issue with living in a bubble is a somewhat distorted reality. I am aware of this and _trying_ not to be shortsighted. I feel otherwise quite comfortable in my moral bubble. Often I have to go out of my way to achieve something, but for me life is about agreeing with self not about making everything easy.
> More than half the population of Earth logged into a FB product at least once last month.
(from parent's parent)
My repeated product/company question was not a mistake. I cannot find any source placing the number of Facebook (product/platform) users anywhere close to "half the population of Earth".
The number of Facebook and Instagram users combined (and WhatsApp even boosts this number) seems more suiting but under the assumption that there are no duplicate users logging to more platforms at least once monthly.
> They use it because they fucking love to.
Since I have already mixed user base and morality topics when pointing out brand choice, I'll allow myself to add: same with heroine users.
But a login is not the same as a truly active user/customer. At least in my bubble, people log in/open the app out of FOMO, check if there is anything new, most likely find nothing intriguing, and log out/close the app again. Rinse and repeat every week.
dont have to love it, but yeah they have an account. i have an account and i would use it for payments (fb has a ton of cash backing to be considered reliable , and banks absolutely need as much competition as possible).
This would fit in nicely with the FB marketplace and help it become more like WeChat. I have family that uses WeChat. In China it`s an all in one app. The payment features are very convenient.
This should have happened for a long time. Facebook's properties are the places where my friends naturally ask for money from me to help. Even with all the negativity I see here in other comments, this is the natural way for Facebook to grow, not trying to compete with the Federal Reserve.
In an ideal world I'd love to see social media apps be able to loosely hook in to banking apps. So facebook messenger would handle requests and you would tap "send" in facebook messanger which would open your bank app with something like "Send $10 to facebook user ___ and let facebook confirm transaction success" so facebook never has to hold your money or make transactions, but you can make payment requests in messenger.
Although I do remember that the US doesn't really have a good/fast way to make instant bank to bank transactions so that could be an issue.
PSDR2 (EU) and Open Banking (UK) regulations have this as a possibility.
I'm not up to speed on how fast implementation of the 'L2' has been, but this is a very real use case. And no need to open your banking app since delegation to your 3rd party app (Facebook in this case).
Jack Mallers (CEO of Strike) gave a presentation about the Lightning network as the open protocol for international fiat debit payments, and multiple Facebook managers were on that meeting. Now that Cashapp integrated sending money with it, Strike can be connected with US Chase bank account, the race for embracing the open protocol is on.
The cool thing with USD payments over lightning network is that capital gains tax is not triggered.
Facebook had a multimillion dollar business (yes, million, not trillion, but this was solid) in the form of FB marketplace. That was the one part of FB that was super useful and if they hooked it up with a secure payment system that worked with these kinds of transactions it could have been amazing. Instead they squandered it on ads, as they always do. The platform is now unusable.
Users are. Listings aren’t. Most of my feed is ads for online stores masquerading as local listings. Like legit 10 out of 12 are this. You can search but you can’t just see “what has been listed lately” and their AB testing keeps changing the UI slightly so you can’t always find the right filters anyways.
What you described has been available for a long time. The old Facebook Pay (i.e. the ability to send payments to your friends via ACH) has been available in Messenger for at least 5 years (probably even longer). This new Facebook Pay seems to just add an easy way to link payment methods to your account and pay merchants on Facebook/Instagram.
I'm just glad they're doing this properly. They wasted almost a decade on determining what everyone in the world already knew, i.e. ads in messaging products are just. not. gonna. work.
I guess that they were blinded by the margin discrepancy, like many others.
Off topic, but I really hate this trend of using animate-in transitions for _every_ _single_ _section_ of the page. Why I do always have to scroll into a half a window's worth of blank background before the content appears with some cutesy slide-in animation? I could perhaps forgive it if it was just badly implemented lazy-loading images but it also does this for simple section titles and body text as well. It ends up taking twice the time to read since you have to keep waiting for text to appear. It also looks quite bizarre if you refresh the page while scrolled to the bottom and then scroll back up.
To be clear, this is not a complaint about tying dynamic effects to scroll position. Apple does those all the time [0][1][2] but at least you will never have a big gap of blank content at the bottom of the page, usually there is fresh content continously immediately visible as you are scrolling. I don't even mind if there is a bit of initial page-loading animation at the start, as long as it's just once.
Does anyone really prefer reading pages like this? It just seems very disrespectful of the user's time, forcing them to continuously wait just to read your promotional copy.
Dude, we are hype and cool and we have the power of JS and CSS transitions at our fingertips. Why should we sacrifice our amazing experience that all end-users love just to please some purist-wannabe power user who enjoys to read content without hindrances, delays and amazing visual effects based on carefully-calculated bezier curves by our best-of-class team?
100%. I don't get all this negativity! I love animations and wasteful frivolous effects. They really jazz up my day. Huge typography, rounded buttons, and massive amounts of negative space reduces stress, and improves my mental health. Really does the job! I don't think I can ever go back to "good ol" days of "functional design". Pfff...it is all so boring. I like mindless consumption and basically buy anything I see in an ad.
In this case there’s no value added, no. That’s okay in some cases, but the purpose of this page is to communicate the value of Facebook Pay, and this doesn’t really help. And it’s badly done too: kinda janky on some components and easing is weirdly inconsistent.
“Visual stability” is a good way to talk about it, thanks for the term. I think part of the issue is the unpredictability of not knowing where and when the next bit of text is going to appear :P
I agree and would even go as far as to say that I don't like tying dynamic effects to scroll position at all. Those Apple sites are "cool", but they're hard to parse. If I want to find some piece of info again, it's not easy.
Really wish animations would go away for the most part. They make sites and tools take longer and force the user to pause between actions when they may not need to otherwise. If the animation contributes something, fine, but if the purpose of a site is to show off pictures and text, just leave the animations out of it.
I do agree that animation, when used, should be a deliberate and thoughtful choice. Sometimes animations are helpful to show a connection between two things, illustrate change or show contrast. A designer should have always ask, what value does animation add here? How does it strengthen communication and understanding? Animation can be a great tool when appropriate but shouldn’t just be a mindless default.
I remember there were a lot of powerpoint presentations that did this back in the day as well, along with "clipart" cartoon noises with every transition. It's really fun to produce a presentation like that, but everyone collectively agreed that it was pretty tedious relatively quickly.
Apropos of nothing, I find it hilarious to see how much diversity has been crammed into this ad page. The hero image is a multiethnic androgynous sk8r and I see one mostly occluded white-presenting person among the 7 photographs.
Facebook Pay is literally just Messenger Pay which (later Libra co-founder) David Marcus put into place in 2015, and which approximately no bugger used.
(I mean, there are some users - including comments on this page - and they like it. But it never took off.)
They rebranded it as Facebook Pay in late 2019. Morning Brew said at the time: "If Libra is the Thanksgiving turkey you tried deep frying but caught on fire, Facebook Pay is the backup rotisserie chicken."
But it's not actually a payment system. It's just a Facebook-y front end, but the actual payments are handled by Mastercard, Visa, PayPal or your bank.
I believe Facebook Pay is part of the WhatsApp Pay trial in Brazil - though that uses the local PIX fast payment system to reach the bank/credit-card backends.
It's not clear why this is hitting HN again. But Facebook Pay is a thing that a few people use, and which basically hasn't been killed yet 'cos Facebook really wants to get into payments, somehow.
This will be massive in Europe for WhatsApp. Just went on a ski trip with people from a number of European countries. All use WhatsApp but we didn’t have a single app to send money to each other. PayPal was the only option but most people didn’t have that so we used cash.
Right! Most of EU countries have one dominant e-payments provider. Some of these national fintech startups are owned by or have links with local banks. Hard to find a product that is 100% usable in every EU nation, besides traditional US players. Once, you cross borders, you have to adapt. This Facebook initiative has the potential to unify a dislocated ecosystem and facilitate users' convenience and adoption of P2P digital payments.
Some risks that would put a halt to this? The EU regulatory bodies in Brussels. They'll find any reason(s) to put some breaks/guardrails and slow down the exponential adoption of FB Pay. Not being too pessimistic, but their mutual relation isn't in the best shape nowadays.
I do use Facebook for donations as our nonprofit get 100% of the donated amount, i.e. Facebook eats the fees, and that's great. But I would never use a payment system from Facebook given the lack of customer support, crazy bans (locking you out of pages, which have nothing to do with your personal profile). They forced me to violate their own rules and create a fake account, which I use to manage my pages if they decide to temporarily ban me - until one day they decide the ban to be permanent!
Interestingly India is not on the list. While one can use UPI to make payments via WA, their market share is less than a percentage.
Having said that,I hope this takes off. All of my friends prefer Instagram as our primary messaging app since it takes a username and not a phone number to text someone. It would be helpful, if we could makes payments there.
The "I would never trust fb with my purchases" crowd are not included in the target audience. Hearing them say they wouldn't use it is redundant.
This is a killer product, it is just 3 years too late. I have no idea why this took so long. It has potential, but will it succeed? Hard to tell, they have lots of competition
Anyone else finding that clicking on this link overrides their browser's "back" button? It's just grayed out after clicking on the link. Might well be browser-specifc - I'm on Firefox.
I'm skeptical FB is so sketchy as to do this intentionally, but I've also never seen this behavior before.
It seems to be using normal debit / credit card payments behind the scenes, so it’s not going to eat the banks’ lunch too much just yet. What would be really good is if they could do A2A payments and circumvent the Mastercard / Visa merchant payment rails and fees. That could be a game changer.
Sending money from a debit account is one thing, but where does the money go? An arbitrary number on a web page like PayPal, or would you get the money directly in your bank account?
Why would anybody want this versus existing alternatives? OK, the USP of sending money to your Facebook friends... well, if they're my friends, we've been sending money to each other for years when splitting bills etc. It's a solved problem.
I don't know. I went to the theatre last week with some friends. One of them bought the tickets and I didn't have her bank details. We organised everything over messenger.
With this Facebook Pay, I could probably just have paid her from within messenger. Instead I had to open my bank app and have it generate a link, copy that and paste it into messenger. The end result is the same; and with the link it would go straight into her account, but its just a bit more clumsy - using two apps, when with Facebook Pay one will do.
It's surprise me how in the US and other countries there isn't any movement like Bizum in Spain, which you can pay in stores and give or receive money with other people only interchanging a phone number linked with a bank account.
That service is maintained with practically all banks in the country, valid to use with any other person who also have an account, doesn't have any transaction or a monthly/periodical fee, can't roll back payments easily if you screw up, and some other advantages.
There was a thread on HN a few days ago [1] that discussed a similar idea. The prevailing notion seems to be that the far larger number of independent banks in the US makes coordinating on this sort of system far more challenging. In my experience, countries with a lower number of banks (<20 or so?) tend to be farther ahead on systems that require first-party cooperation.
However, I wouldn't say there "isn't any movement" in the US. To clarify, what I noted above obviously doesn't preclude or justify the absence of a comparable system that supports at least a subset of US banks. Zelle may one day gain wider adoption in this fashion, and third-party approaches (such as Venmo) already handle most private transactions somewhat reasonably despite relying on ACH transfers for funding rather than first-party bank support.
There's a classic Planet Money episode all about how behind the US is with inter-bank transfers. The huge number of often small banks in the US did seem to be a very significant part of the problem. Here in the UK we have many fewer banks, which makes it possible to build out the infrastructure that allows almost instantaneous transactions (rarely more than 15 seconds). As far as I'm aware support for the Faster Payments system is universal. I think that would have been much harder if there had been a large number of small banks without the technical capability to roll out such a system.
> For extra security, set up a PIN, face ID or fingerprint to confirm a payment at checkout.
This doesn’t sound appealing to me. They’re surely storing this biometric data on a server somewhere, right? I use FaceID or my Apple Watch to pay with ApplePay all the time but my biometrics never leave my device.
I don’t follow Facebook all that closely (never used any of its services). Do they have other services that use (require?) face or fingerprint identification? Or is Facebook Pay a sly way for them to start harvesting this data?
I think this will be successful on Instagram because there is a TON of e-commerce happing on Instagram with awkward mechanics like linking to an Etsy or Shopify store in the image caption. If a vendor like this: https://www.instagram.com/summergirldesigns could just allow "Add to Cart" for each of her items, it would probably result in more sales.
This has actually been a thing on Instagram for a while now. There is an entire shopping tab on the app. Not sure how that differs from Facebook Pay though.
Availability shows Afghanistan. How did they get approval for that? Does it mean mums on Facebook can now financially support Taliban and other groups?
I read the entire article, but they don’t mention the details of how they’re going to make all your purchase history available to advertisers, and how they’re going to use this to track you around the internet even better to spam you with more ads of things you just bought. Maybe I just missed these details though…
> Safe to assume Facebook is going to milk this data for all it's worth.
I'm no Facebook fan, but let's be honest. Your bank, credit card company, and merchants are all doing exactly the same thing. Perhaps the bank is regulated tightly enough that it isn't quite as bad, but the others definitely are.
Every single store that asks if you want a digital receipt in lieu of paper, is doing this. Every single store that gives you coupons in exchange for your your email, is doing this.
You're not wrong. What's troubling is combining that with information gleaned from from the "social graph" as well as well as all the surveillance Facebook does via its web trackers. I'd rather this stuff be stored in different silos by different competitors than centralized in one place.
Although IIRC Facebook already buys some of this info from data brokers so...
My bank (eu) has ver strict privacy controls. Not least of which was me telling them I'll leave if anything spammy appears.
Cc company, same.
Merchants? To be fair, Ialways expect an avalanche of crap after signing something, but...nothing yet.
Eu rules in general, or I just got lucky?
Yeah but Facebook is primarily an advertising company, and one of the biggest advertising companies at that. They can much better leverage this data and milk it to a much greater extent. People aren't going to your bank or credit card company in order to buy ads targetting you.
> In 1999, Congress passed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLB).
...
> Under GLB, companies can sell their customers’ financial data to anyone they choose, including credit card information such as the date, amount, and recipient of charges, and the personal details consumers provide when they fill out applications. Consumers have no privacy under federal regulations unless they affirmatively take steps to “opt out” of this sharing, repeating the process for each and every financial service provider who may have data about them.
...
> Even this opt-out option is not available for consumers to stop credit card companies and issuing banks from sharing this data with their financial affiliates and financial “joint marketers,” a vaguely defined term that provides a giant loophole in privacy protections.
PS. Just to make sure - I'm not trying to defend Facebook here, or credit card companies.
To note, credit card companies are open about this in the contracts you sign, and it’s their core business model so there is no possible surprise element.
Wait, so their solution to fraud is "send us an email and pray something happens"? Neat. If I could trust this thing less I would, but the word "Facebook" in the name already pegs it at zero, so... Hard pass.
And about storage, ok, read this:
Anti-fraud technology monitors purchases on our systems to detect unauthorized activity.
Your payment method is not shared with buyers, sellers, or merchants without your consent, and is stored separately from your account data.
And tell me it doesn't say all payment data is stored on FB servers and mined by all their algorithms.
... with a canned response saying "sorry, nothing we can do!"
From the FAQ:
> Is there Purchase Protection for online shopping?
> Purchases made through third-party sites, local pickups, Messenger transactions, or through other messaging services don't qualify for Purchase Protection. Learn more about how Purchase Protection works on Facebook.
"""
Facebook will receive your Facebook Pay order information and may use the data as outlined in our Data Policy. This includes showing your transaction information in your Facebook Pay settings. The actions you take with Facebook Pay can be used for purposes such as to serve you more relevant content, provide customer support, and promote safety and integrity (example: to investigate violations of our policies). The payment card numbers you provide won’t be shared with anyone for marketing purposes, used to personalize your experience nor inform the ads you see without your consent. Learn more about what Facebook Pay does with your payment information.
Don't worry, some people who made their money from ads or ad-dependent business models will be along shortly to tell us how ads are actually a good thing, and targeted^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H "relevant" ads are even better.
Under the UK varient of the Facebook Pay site, the Instagram advert has the incorrect decimal separater: using the comma used with Euro's and not the dot/period.
£16,50
UK uses commas, but only to separate by thousounds. This makes £16,50 seem like it was going to be £16,500 instead.
I couldn’t find info if it will support cross country payments to _any_ supporter country.
Being able to send and receive money to and from friends and family without fees and using real exchange rates could potentially be the only reason to sign in to Facebook.
How does this work? Is it a wallet app? Does it act as an interface to your bank's payment network? The kind of vague useless "explanation"[1] getting parroted in the "How it works" page is something I haven't seen anyone do for a long time. If you don't want to tell your consumers clearly, why even bother with such bullshit?
[1]: Facebook Pay is a seamless and secure way to make payments on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp. Enter your payment card or account information once and then use Facebook Pay to make purchases, send money or donate within the apps. A PIN or biometrics can be added to secure individual payments. Facebook Pay is also a way to view payment history, manage payment information and access customer support. Facebook Pay is currently rolling out in select countries.
Centralized Social networks like Faceboon and WhatsApp can roll out a payment system nearly overnight and have it accepted at millions of merchants. Crypto after 10 years is hardly accepted anywhere…
Seems like this is 3 years behind everyone else... Which is a bigger issue than the branding itself. I couldn't find one aspect that made it have a competitive advantage over already established brands.
Send money to friends is definitely a feature that facebook should have implemented early. Now it feels very late in that “pay” game. It makes them look like the google+ of payments.
On firefox, clicking this link loads the page and somehow disables the back button to get back to HN. It does not load in a new tab. Anyone else have this experience?
Facebook should have dominated the payments space. It failed. Every few years they announce new payments products and strategy. Nothing fundamentally changes.
took them long enough. How does this work within apple's walled garden, is apple entitled to a cut? I thought they could use their reach to get people to sidestet apple's requirements.
I am very genuinely curious about whether we disagree on the "Facebook is a bad company" part or not.
And if you think FB is not a bad company. Can the below examples convince you?
If the below examples cannot convince you. Where do you disagree and where do you think I am wrong?
I know this could be way too real for some folks to answer. Especially for folks who use FB for a living (marketing etc) and for FB employees. So hopefully I can encourage some genuine conversations. :)
