US Patent 9595031 Payment via a messaging application

Technology is disclosed for a convenient money transfer without requiring any account login and/or creation activities. The disclosed technology enables a sender to transfer a specified amount of currency to one or more recipients through a payment application while executing an instant message application. The disclosed technology enables the payment application to act as a background process associated with or incorporated in the instant message application, so as to provide the user with a “seamless” user experience. In response to detection of a specified identifier, the technology provides a user interface to collect a numerical value corresponding to the specified amount of currency, accesses a list of contacts in a database of the sender's mobile device, and then provides the list of contacts to the sender. The technology enables the sender to manually select recipients from the provided list of contacts and can accordingly initiate a payment process based on statuses of selected recipients.