It's interesting that according to the FT article mentioned [0] the license is for Europe - and they're talking with UK payments companies. I'm not sure about the rest of Europe, but in the UK I don't imagine a lot of interest - payments are easy by bank transfer. Paying to other European countries isn't great via the banks, I imagine most people use something like Paypal now. But I don't think international payments are likely to be a big part of Facebook realistically.
The license is apparently valid throughout Europe though so maybe other countries have poorer bank transfer systems and this would be better.
> Paying to other European countries isn't great via the banks
How so? With SEPA[1] it's both easy (European wide bank account number) and free (might not be the case if both accounts use different currencies though, but in euros it's free).
That was definitely an oversight on my part, sorry. I'm in the UK and while we have free payments to UK banks we don't to Europe. My bank charges £22 and takes 2-4 days to make a payment in Euros to Europe, from GBP. We do have EBANs though. Paypal was much better but SEPA sounds like a much better approach.
That just makes me wonder more why they went for Europe first, it seems to be impossible to monetise pretty much anything except cross currency.
How so? With SEPA[1] it's both easy (European wide bank account number) and free (might not be the case if both accounts use different currencies though, but in euros it's free).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area