Users of Facebook, the social networking site, will be able to transfer money directly to each other for the first time from Saturday. Moneybookers, a European online payments provider, is launching an application which will allow customers who have registered their bank details with the service to make charity donations, repay loans from friends or pay for services via Facebook, paying a maximum fee of 40p.

Moneybookers, which is regulated in the UK by the Financial Services Authority, is already used by Unicef, Wikipedia and Skype to process payments and donations. Martin Ott, managing director at Moneybookers, hopes his company can increase its base of almost 5m users – which it claims is already growing by 9,000 a day – by tapping into the potential for viral growth provided by a community of 70m active users.