Facebook has never emphasized payments as a part of its revenue model. And it seems it won’t start now.

The social media site is all about advertising revenue derived from its 1.5 billion users, but the hiring of PayPal President David Marcus in June 2014 to helm the Messenger app led to speculation that payments were about to play a more important role. About 20% of the people on the planet have Facebook accounts, so why wouldn’t financial transactions be a part of that?

Peer-to-peer payment functionality was built into the app last March, and that is expected to soon expand to allow users to pay businesses, as well. It’s not hard to imagine functionality expanding to pay utility bills, cross-border payments, and the like.

In Messenger, as Mitt Romney would want it, businesses are basically just “other people,” many of whom happen to be selling stuff. Facebook payments are free for users, and it’s not known what fee Facebook is paying the networks for processing transactions. As of last January, Facebook payments revenue stubbornly remained flat.

Marcus, speaking to Wired UK recently, indicated that Facebook wanted payments to simply fit into the general messaging experience:

With his PayPal background, will Messenger also offer businesses a direct payment service? “We don’t want to build a payments business,” Marcus replies, “but we absolutely need to build a frictionless payment experience when people are in threads. If I have a flight open with KLM, I should be able to book my next flight and have a one-tap purchase experience. Same for e-commerce. The first baby steps are peer-to-peer payments in the US, which will expand into different countries.” He sends a dollar to a colleague through the app to demonstrate.

Still… wouldn’t payments provide a tempting revenue model? “When you’re a business that generates most of its revenues from advertising, it’s just a better business,” he says. “eBay takes a cut of every transaction and listing; Alibaba does all that for free, and makes money from advertising. Alibaba is bigger than eBay and Amazon combined, and is growing much faster. We take the same approach. We want the maximum number of transactions on the platform, while enabling the best possible mobile experience for commerce. The margins on payments aren’t that high, and we want the broadest reach. Businesses will want to pay to be featured or promoted — which is a bigger opportunity for us.”

With businesses playing a large part in the future of Messenger, payments will play a role, but Facebook simply wants it buried, as with Uber — frictionless and invisible. It should work out fine. Chats with businesses on Messenger are just like chats with people — they never close, they sit there, waiting to be picked up at any time.

Learn about payments innovation at Bank Innovation in Tel Aviv, Nov. 10-11. Request an invitation here.