Facebook has announced Facebook Pay, a new payment method that can be used throughout the ecosystem of apps and services provided by and within Facebook. The goal of Facebook Pay is to unify the payment experience across different experiences, like buying items from shops, donating money to charity, and send money to friends.
Facebook Pay makes it easier to make payments by adding your preferred payment method to Facebook Pay itself, then choosing it as a payment option wherever you see fit. This should help make it easier to set up in different places, but this won"t happen automatically, so you won"t provide your payment information to services and apps if you don"t want to. Facebook Pay also lets you see your payment history, as you"d expect, and you can get real-time customer support, though this will only be available in the United States at first.
The same could be said for Facebook Pay itself, which will be available in the U.S. this week, starting with fundraisers, in.game purchases, event tickets, person-to-person payments on Messenger, and select pages and businesses on Facebook Marketplace. It"ll come to more regions in the future, and it will also eventually expand to Instagram and WhatsApp.
Facebook Pay supports most credit and debit cards, as well As PayPal, and it runs off exisiting infrastructure, unlike the company"s Calibra wallet project, which runs on the Libra network. The social networking giant also promises to keep your data safe by encrypting all of your payment information and continuously monitoring it for fraud. You can also enable a PIN or use biometric sensors on your device"s to validate payments, and that information isn"t shared with Facebook.
You can learn more about Facebook Pay on its official website.