Facebook brings Messenger payments to France and the U.K.

Facebook Messenger extended its peer-to-peer payment system to millions of users by making payments possible in Euros and British pounds in France and the United Kingdom respectively. This is the first time P2P payment is being made available to Facebook Messenger users outside the U.S. since being introduced more than two years ago. The news was announced in a Facebook blog post.

To find P2P in Messenger, tap the blue plus icon on the left side of your iOS or Android mobile device. This opens the chat extension drawer, and the first thing you see should be a green “Cash” icon in order to send money without leaving the chat app.

Also announced today, users in France and the United Kingdom will now see suggestions related to P2P from AI assistant M. That means that when the topic of payments comes up during conversations, M will recommend that the payment be made with Messenger.

Messenger users in the United Kingdom already had the ability to interact with M suggestions, but they’re available for the first time today in France. M can do things like recommend stickers or birthday wishes as well as Spotify music, Food Network recipes, or food from Delivery.com. Since first becoming available this spring following an announcement at F8, M suggestions have grown their third-party bot recommendations and offerings outside the U.S.

Earlier today at Web Summit in Lisbon, Facebook launched version 2.2 of the Messenger Platform. Among major upgrades is built-in NLP in 10 new languages (including French) and a closed beta of Customer Chat, the first native plugin from Facebook that will bring conversations with bots and humans to websites.

Since the launch of the Messenger Platform and P2P payments, Facebook’s chat app with more than 1.3 billion monthly active users has come to include bots from TransferWise, Western Union, American Express, Mastercard, and a number of other financial service providers.

PayPal P2P payments in Messenger were enabled last month.