You may soon be able to send your friends money through Facebook Messenger

Social networking giant Facebook is looking into mobile payments.

This is according to a new report from TechCrunch, where a new friend-to-friend payment option already exists in Facebook Messenger.

The social network just has to flip the switch on the feature, and it appears as if users will be able to send each other cash as easily as they might otherwise send a photo or cat emoticon.

The details were were found by Stanford University student Andrew Aude, who dug deep into the app’s code to find what Facebook’s been hiding after security researcher Jonathan Zdziarski first tipped Facebook’s hand one month prior.

To send a payment along, you can either input a brand-new card or use one you already have on file with Facebook and, yes, your payment system can be protected by a unique PIN number, just in case you lose your smartphone and someone decides to send themselves a ton of your cash.

So far, users can only use their debit cards with the payment service presumably, because the fee for doing so is much less than forwarding someone cash via a credit card charge or direct pull from one’s bank account.

The current version of Facebook’s payments only allows one user to give to another, notes within the app’s code suggest that users will, at some point, be able to pay groups of people at once.

However, we are not sure when Facebook might officially unveil its payments system.

Credit: PC Mag