Facebook is reportedly expanding its banking ambitions with a new division that will run all of the tech giant's payment projects, including Facebook Pay
- Facebook is kicking off a new internal group that will oversee all of the company's payment projects, including Facebook Pay.
- According to a Bloomberg report, the new program will be called Facebook Financial, or F2, and will be run by David Marcus, the cocreator of the firm's Libra cryptocurrency project.
- The new group is one of the company's latest efforts as part of its broader foray into commerce and finance.
Facebook is launching a new division to expand its payments and commerce ambitions, per a Bloomberg report.
Facebook Financial — or F2 — will oversee all of the tech giant's payments projects, including Facebook Pay, the service launched in 2019 that allows users to send and receive money on Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger.
F2 will be run by David Marcus, an exec who led Facebook's Messenger unit for four years before co-creating Facebook's Libra cryptocurrency project.
"We have a lot of commerce stuff going on across Facebook," Marcus told Bloomberg. "It felt like it was the right thing to do to rationalize the strategy at a company level around all things payments."
According to Bloomberg, one of the division's priorities will be rounding out WhatsApp's payments operations in India as well as Brazil, a market it waded into in June, as well as leaping through regulatory hurdles posed in both markets.
Facebook did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.
The new division is one of Facebook's latest efforts to expand into commerce and finance. And as Bloomberg notes, it's also another push toward the firm's broader goal of integrating its apps with its individual products.
"As payments grow across Messenger and WhatsApp, and as we're able to roll that out in more places, I think that that will only grow as a trend," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in the company's Q2 earnings call in July, per the outlet.