Facebook Pay will be renamed Meta Pay soon

A new blog post from Stephane Kasriel, Meta’s head of fintech, states that Facebook Pay is adopting the Meta branding. Soon to be Meta Pay – the refresh is working on enhancing the online payment experience.

Meta is also exploring how to make payments easier to process within the metaverse. Kasriel said that the company is in the “very early stages” of creating a single wallet experience for users. This would explore how you carry your identity throughout the metaverse, storing digital goods, and how you can easily pay with the method you want.

The company sees Meta Pay as an opportunity to “bring more people into the financial system.” With 1 billion people globally who don’t have any form of ID, Meta is looking to solve this problem; doing so could empower more users to support themselves, or even start their own business.

Meta Pay will also seeking to help businesses and creators better serve their audiences. With the potential of the metaverse expanding commerce opportunities, Meta Pay can make this possible. It said there will be more to expect regarding this area throughout the year.

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. 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.

It's not exactly a beloved gadget like the iPod, but a workhorse of social commerce is also getting put out to pasture. Stephane Kasriel, the leader of Meta's financial services operation, announced that the company's retiring the Facebook Pay name in favor of Meta Pay.

Facebook Pay dates back to 2009, when Facebook had ambitions to harness payments within social gaming apps like FarmVille, charging a hefty cut of transactions. That business faded as mobile gaming took over and consumers got bored with clicking sheep, but Facebook Pay remained as a system for processing all sorts of commerce within Facebook's growing empire.

The Facebook Pay name clearly stopped making sense when Facebook Inc. renamed itself Meta Platforms Inc., but the company was also struggling with what to call its financial division, which encompassed Facebook Pay and the newer Novi crypto wallet. The whole division was set to be renamed Novi, but then executive David Marcus, the former PayPal president who oversaw Novi, left. Kasriel, his successor, renamed the group Meta Financial Technologies.

Kasriel suggested there might be a rethink of Meta's wallet offering across its products. "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," he wrote. Meta spokespeople didn't address the future of the Novi name in light of Kasriel's announcement, but a representative told Protocol in April that the crypto wallet was still called Novi for now.

The Meta Pay name, which Kasriel said would be rolled out soon, will make more sense for a number of initiatives the company is pushing. Instagram is heavily promoting its shopping features, but presents Facebook Pay as an option at checkout.

Meta's recently gotten blowback over its payment system for NFTs in Horizon Worlds. Instagram chief Adam Mosseri took pains to note that there wouldn't be a charge for a new feature that allows users to share NFTs on the platform.