#Facebook Takes on Venmo With New Split Payments Feature

Facebook wants you to use Messenger as a way to send money. Most people think of Venmo as the go-to cash-sending app, but Facebook wants you to use Messenger. To help convince you to try its money-sending Messenger features, the company is adding a new Split Payments feature.

“If you’ve struggled with dividing up (and getting paid back for) group dinners, shared household expenses, or even the monthly rent, it’s about to get easier. Next week for Messenger fans in the US, we’re starting to test Split Payments, a free and fast way to share the cost of bills and expenses,” says The Messenger Team in a blog post.

Messenger has offered the option to pay people for some time, as Facebook Pay launched in 2019, but the new feature lets you make a group chat and request money from many people towards a total. It can divide the payments evenly or request a certain amount from each person.

Facebook will start testing the Split Payments feature the week of December 6, 2021, in the US. When it’s available to you, you’ll need to click the “Get Started” in a group chat or under the Facebook Pay section of the app. From there, you can choose a dollar amount and whether you want to split it evenly (with or without yourself) or select specific amounts for each person.

It sounds useful enough, but getting a group of people to set up their payment details through Messenger so you can use this feature sounds like more of a headache than it’s worth. Most people are already using Cash App, Apple Cash, Venmo, or some other payment app, and getting them to use a new one just because it has a unique feature is unlikely to happen.

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