#socialpaymentsanalysis

Facebook thinks making payments should be as easy as sending a photo. But rolling out that service for more than a billion users isn’t something the social network’s executives think it can do on its own.

“We don’t believe we are a payments company—we don’t believe we have the skills to be a payments company,” Paulette Rowe, Facebook’s global head of payment and financial services partnerships, said today at the Money 20/20 Europe conference in Amsterdam. “What we do want to do is to partner.”

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has acknowledged the company’s ambitions to ramp up its payment offerings. A successful payments business, after all, could help Facebook diversify away from its dependence on advertising based on collecting personal data. The company recently launched a checkout service on Instagram so users can pay for things without leaving the app. Facebook also has 1 billion people using a beta version of WhatsApp payments in India, and it recently picked London as a hub for its drive to expand WhatsApp payments globally.

Facebook Inc. is enabling people outside the U.S. to send money to each other via its Messenger texting app for the first time.

The social network said Monday that Messenger users in the U.K. will be able to send money to each other when the feature rolls out in the next few weeks. People will need to sign up with their debit cards to send or receive money.

“In the U.S. most people use payments in Messenger to send less than $50 at a time,” David Marcus, head of Messenger, said in a statement, adding that the feature is most commonly used during social occasions.

Facebook began letting its users in the U.S. send cash to each other in 2015 but doesn’t charge for its use. The move is part of an increasing trend by tech giants to muscle in on the global payments industry.

Apple Inc.’s forthcoming Apple Pay Cash will let the company’s device owners send money to each other through its iMessage service. Square Inc. has a similar product called Square Cash, and PayPal Holdings Inc.’s Venmo has been a popular choice for younger users in particular.

Millennials are changing a host of industries, but perhaps none more drastically than the financial technology space, PayPal CEO Dan Schulman told CNBC on Monday.

"You have to, to serve these markets, re-imagine how money can be managed and moved because there's going to be more change in the next five years in financial services than happened in the past 30," Schulman told "Mad Money" host Jim Cramer.

PayPal's peer-to-peer payment app, Venmo, speaks volumes to the way younger generations interpret money management, the CEO said.

"If you think about the under-30 generation, the millennial generation – GenTech, as I call them – they grew up with a screen in front of them. And so they think about everyday processes, like payments, differently than you and I do," Schulman told Cramer. "The public-private boundaries are different than what you and I grew up with."

"For Venmo, they put a tag or an emoji on every one of their payments," Schulman continued. "It's really not a P2P service, it's a social payments experience. And they love doing it. They open the app just to see what their friends are doing."

Today, Schulman said the person-to-person payment business is valued between $35 billion and $40 billion. In five years, its projected value is estimated to reach $335 billion.