Facebook Pay will soon be renamed Meta Pay, according to a blog post written by Meta’s head of fintech, Stephane Kasriel. With the rebrand, the company is focusing on enhancing the payments experiences it already provides with Facebook Pay in regions where it’s seeing good adoption, as opposed to focusing on expanding to new countries.
Meta is also exploring how it can further simplify the payments experience across its platforms to make them easier to access and process in the metaverse. Kasriel noted that Meta is in the “very early stages” of considering what a single wallet experience may look like. He outlined that in terms of its early thinking, Meta is looking at how you prove who you are and carry that identity into different experiences in the metaverse.
The company is also considering how you can store the digital goods you own and take them with you wherever you go. Lastly, the company is looking at how you can pay easily and with the payment method you want, whether that’s to a friend or making a purchase from a business or creator. The company plans to share more on this in the future.
“Our path forward is grounded in our mission to empower everyone, everywhere to access the world’s financial system to accelerate financial inclusion and economic empowerment,” Kasriel writes. “Designing products and infrastructure with the metaverse in mind today will help facilitate innovation that delivers greater access and real cost savings — before the metaverse even becomes mainstream. Now is the time to lay down the building blocks for the future. Because once that foundation is in place, the potential of the metaverse, and where it can take fintech next, will be limitless.”
Facebook has been in payments since 2009 and says people use its platforms to make payments in 160 countries and 55 currencies, including person to person, business to business, and business to consumer payments.
Facebook changed its corporate branding to Meta in October to capture more of the company’s core ambition, which is to build the metaverse. Since then, Meta has started renaming its products to match the new corporate branding. For example, Oculus Quest is now Meta Quest, and Facebook Portal is now Meta Portal. It makes sense for Meta to make the change for its payments experience as well, especially as it gears up for the metaverse.
