Facebook has formed a new group tasked with responsibility for handling the company's digital payments push. Bloomberg reports that the new unit, called F2 (Facebook Financial), will oversee all of the social media giant's payments initiatives such as Facebook Pay, which was unveiled late last year to unify the payment experience across Facebook's ecosystem of apps and services.
As per a Bloomberg report, the group will be led by David Marcus, who co-created Facebook's Libra cryptocurrency project. He will remain the head of Novi, a division that's developing a digital wallet designed for Libra. Novi is the new brand given in May to the former Libra wallet, Calibra. In addition, he will play an important role in WhatsApp’s payments project in India and Brazil. In a statement, Marcus said:
“We have a lot of commerce stuff going on across Facebook. It felt like it was the right thing to do to rationalize the strategy at a company level around all things payments.”
The initial focus of the group will be to bolster WhatsApp's payments in India and Brazil. In June, Facebook rolled out digital payments on the platform in Brazil, allowing users to send money or make purchases from local businesses from within the messaging app. Of course, Facebook needs to obtain approval from regulators in order to roll out its payments projects in different countries.
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