Facebook Appoints Libra Creator David Marcus as Head of Facebook Financial

Facebook has unveiled its latest initiative - a financial unit that will pursue payments and commerce opportunities within all of the company’s apps. David Marcus, co-creator of Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency project, will lead the team.

Facebook Financial, which will be called F2 internally, will run all payments and e-commerce projects, including Facebook Pay, Facebook’s universal payments feature that it intends to build inside all of its apps.

“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.” He said to Bloomberg.

Former Upwork CEO Stephane Kasriel has been appointed as payments vice president, working under Marcus. Marcus will continue to simultaneously run the development of Facebook’s Novi, a digital wallet which holds the Libra cryptocurrency. He will also be involved in developing WhatsApp’s payments efforts in Brazil and India.

Marcus joined Facebook in 2014 from PayPal, where he served as president. He was in charge of Facebook Messenger for four years before taking on the leadership of Libra.

During the company’s second-quarter earnings call last month, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he was “quite excited” about commerce inside of messaging apps, “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,” he said.

If users can make purchases on Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp, thenits likely that Facebook’s advertising will become more valuable, and users will spend more time inside the company’s apps.

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