Facebook Pay to become Meta Pay soon; Here’s what you should know

Facebook’s parent company, Meta is all set to rename its digital payments platform Facebook Pay as Meta Pay, as the social media company doubles down on metaverse. Metaverse is described as a combination of the virtual reality and mixed reality worlds accessed through a browser or headset, which allows people to have real time interactions and experiences across distance. 

In a recent blog post, Meta’s head of fintech, Stephane Kasriel, said that the company is focusing on “enhancing the payments experiences it already provides with Facebook Pay” in regions where it is seeing good adoption, including in India. 

“Meta is also looking to simplify the payments experience across its platforms to make payments easier to access and process in the metaverse. Kasriel noted that “Meta is 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 said.

In this context,  Kasriel 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. For example, in India, Meta has introduced new features to make sending money as easy as sending a message, like including the Rupee symbol within the WhatsApp chat composer and expressive stickers and backgrounds to celebrate cultural milestones like Diwali and Holi.  

With an eye on “financial inclusion and economic empowerment”, Kasriel said, “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.”

Meta is already exploring NFTs — as it announced last week that it would begin testing the ability to share NFTs on Instagram, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that “similar functionality” is coming to Facebook soon.

Kasriel added, “Beyond NFTs, there’s a multitude of other Web3 tokens that we think are compelling — social tokens, community tokens, governance tokens — as well as tokenised real-world assets. In fact, there are a lot of opportunities here, and we’re taking steps to understand them better and what they could mean for the metaverse."

Facebook has been in payments since 2009 and said that “businesses 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 2021 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 and now extending the name to its payments system.