You can now pay with PayPal in Facebook Messenger

PayPal users in the US will now be able to send and receive in-person payments through Facebook Messenger, the company announced this morning. Deeper integration with the Messenger platform, which will also include PayPal’s first customer service bot to handle customer questions and assistance requests, will follow further development between the two companies.

Last year, Facebook and PayPal announced a deeper relationship that allowed customers in the US to purchase from online merchants using their Messenger chatbots and then complete transactions within the messaging app through PayPal. Customers could also link their PayPal account to Messenger to receive notifications and receipts for their online transactions within Messenger.

To date, more than 2.5 million users have linked their PayPal account to Messenger, PayPal says, and that number is expected to grow with today’s news.

For starters, PayPal users can now pay their friends directly within Messenger.

To be clear, this is an alternative to the existing payments feature that has existed within Messenger for several years. This feature initially emerged as Facebook’s own competitor to services like PayPal and PayPal-owned Venmo, Square, and others. But Facebook insisted it wasn’t seeking to build its own payments business—it largely saw the addition as something that would make Messenger better.

Earlier this year, Facebook added support for group payments but said it still wasn’t addressing transaction reduction.

Starting today, Facebook is offering users the option to select PayPal as a funding source for peer-to-peer payments—and it can even be set as the default, according to PayPal.

The new option is available by tapping the blue plus icon in Messenger, then selecting the green «Payments» button to send or request money. From here, you can select PayPal as your payment source when making a payment to a Messenger contact.