Facebook Inc. has a new payment group with a familiar face.
David Marcus, co-creator of the company’s Libra cryptocurrency project, will lead Facebook Financial, an initiative to run all payment projects, including Facebook Pay, a feature it plans to build in all has apps.
Former Upwork Inc. UPWK,
Chief Executive Officer Stephane Kasriel will serve as Payments Vice President under Marcus, who continues Novi, a Facebook FB,
division building a digital wallet to hold the Libra cryptocurrency.
News of Facebook’s latest attempt to bring its individual products and apps closer together has not moved investors. Trading stocks, which set a record last week, are down 2.3% to $ 262.23 in Monday afternoon’s trading.
“We have a lot of commercial stuff on Facebook,” Marcus said, according to a Bloomberg story, where the development was first reported. “It felt like it was the right thing to do to rationalize the company-level strategy around all the payments for things.”
Facebook has not yet made an official announcement about its Facebook Financial Initiative.
Marcus, who joined Facebook in 2014 after becoming president of PayPal Holdings Inc. PYPL,
was in charge of Facebook Messenger for four years before taking on the Libra project.
Facebook created the new payment group so that its billions of members can easily make purchases on Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger and spend more time on the digital features of the company, thereby improving the ads.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he was “very excited” about commerce within messaging apps during the company’s second-quarter revenue last month. “As payments grow over Messenger and WhatsApp, and because we can roll that out in more places, I think that will only grow as a trend,” he said.
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