Facebook Pay to Be Rebranded Meta Pay

Meta Platforms will rename Facebook Pay — its payment system available across Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp — as Meta Pay “soon,” according to a blog post Wednesday (May 11) by Stephane Kasriel, Meta’s head of commerce and financial technologies.

“We’re focused on enhancing the payments experiences we already provide with Facebook Pay where we’re seeing good adoption,” Kasriel wrote in the blog post. “And with this, an emphasis on quality in the countries that we are already in, rather than expanding to new countries right now.”

Meta’s platforms are used by businesses in 160 countries, he wrote.

“We view this as a single wallet experience for people to use to represent who they are, what they own, and how they pay,” wrote Kasriel in the post. “We’re in the very early stages of scoping out what a single wallet experience might look like and will have more to say further down the line.

“We’re looking at: how you can prove who you are and carry that identity into different experiences in the metaverse; how you can store the digital goods you own and take them with you wherever you go; and how you can pay easily and with the payment method you want, whether that’s to a friend or buying from a business or creator,” he wrote.

Related: Super App or Not, Facebook Pay Knows It Needs to Close The Consumer Trust Gap

In August, Facebook Messenger added the option for users to send cash birthday gifts directly through the platform using Facebook Pay.

The end game with Facebook Pay, said Meron Colbeci, head of consumer product management at Facebook, told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster, is to go everywhere its users interact and help them to “close the loop” without ever needing to leave Facebook.

Facebook Pay has taken on a huge number of better-established competitors since its launch, both inside its own ecosystem and across the wider web, including Venmo, PayPal, Cash App, Google Pay and Apple Pay, all of which have a much bigger user base than Facebook Pay.