Thanks to Facebook, you've got one less excuse to pay your friends back ~ lotfi

Facebook has launched a new feature for its Messenger app that lets you send money directly to your friends. It's rolling out "over the coming months" in the US and then may (or may not) extend elsewhere.

Simple, quick mobile payments are being built into a whole host of apps and services: Snapchat introduced a similar scheme in the US last November and the feature arrived in Gmail for UK users in January.

That's on top of established services such as PayPal and new ones like Apple Pay. If you owe your pals a bit of cash then there is now a plethora of different ways to pay them back, with more arriving all the time.

In it for the money

The mass appeal of Facebook Messenger makes this one of the more high-profile options, however. The first time users try to make a payment they'll need to link a valid debit card and set up a PIN.

Facebook is promising "layers of software and hardware protection that meet the highest industry standards" in the official announcement. If you're running Messenger on iOS then you can use Touch ID to verify your identity.

The social network already has plenty of experience handling payments of course, from advertisers selling their wares and gamers looking to get to the next level of Bubble Witch, so the launch should be a fairly smooth one.