“The new partnership will see an expansion of PayPal’s availability as a payment option across the social networking site as well as its Messenger mobile app…”

PayPal has teamed up with Facebook to further extend the reach of its digital payment services.

The companies were already friendly. PayPal subsidiary Braintree started working with Facebook late last year to enable Uber ride hailing via Messenger. The new partnership will see an expansion of PayPal’s availability as a payment option across the social networking site as well as its Messenger mobile app, with customers in the US able to customize their Messenger apps to collect and manage PayPal receipts.

While that functionality is on the way, PayPal is already helping merchants to advertise on Facebook, and is getting involved in the sale of VR headsets from Facebook-owned Oculus.

It’s all part of PayPal’s effort to embed its services into more digital points of sale, itself part of a larger scramble that has seen numerous companies trying to position their own solutions as financial transactions increasingly go online, and the number of avenues for them expands with the expansion of the Internet of Things.