The expansion of payments and ecommerce capabilities is high-priority for the social media company
As being the place that we share social interactions becomes harder to maintain, Facebook is stepping up its efforts to be the place we spend our money.
The firm has been moving into financial services in recent years with projects such as its cryptocurrency offering Libra, but Monday it announced a more cohesive strategy for this area of its business.
Facebook Financial, known internally as F2, will bring together all of the firm’s financial services apps and services. These currently focus on payments and commerce.
The formation of a dedicated unit, under former PayPal executive David Marcus, will oversee major financial services plays, such as the integration of payments solution Facebook Pay across all of the firm’s platforms.
Marcus, who has been leading the Libra project, will also continue to head up Facebook’s Novi, the digital wallet that will hold the cryptocurrency.
“We have a lot of commerce stuff going on across Facebook,” Marcus said. “It felt like it was the right thing to do to rationalize the strategy at a company level around all things payments.”
Combining payments and commerce capabilities across Facebook’s apps including WhatsApp and Messenger is seen as a positive for its core advertising business by streamlining the customer journey from advert to purchase.
Ecommerce
Earlier this year, Facebook announced that it was intensifying its ecommerce capabilities.
The platform hopes to challenge the dominance of Amazon and Shopify with an enhanced ecommerce offering within its main platform.
The ‘Shops’ feature allows users to sell directly within Facebook and Instagram and can be integrated into websites.
The competitive nature of ecommerce has prompted Facebook to make Shops free to create and allows the importing of existing stores from Shopify.
In February, Shopify joined the non-profit association dedicated to building Facebook’s cryptocurrency payments platform.
Mark Zuckerberg, who recently joined Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Microsoft’s Bill Gates in the $100m+ club, is taking a personal interest in the new ecommerce function.
