PayPal Vet To Lead Facebook Payments

Stephane Kasriel, who has served as a PayPal executive in the past, will lead Facebook Payments, David Marcus, leader of Facebook’s Novi said in a Twitter post.

Marcus also said a new group would be formed to monitor “all things payments/FS” at Facebook.

“No changes @Novi, which I’ll continue to lead directly,” the executive said in the post. Novi, for its part, is described as a “digital wallet changing the way money moves,” according to its Twitter account.

As PYMNTS previously reported, Facebook Pay is a tool to take all of the commerce occurring in Facebook’s marketplace and make it simpler for consumers to pay from within the application in lieu of moving offsite to complete a deal.

The technology that enables this function is a single sign-on functionality similar to Google Pay in which users register their preferred payment information, with the inclusion of mobile wallets, into Facebook Pay. They then can decide to use those previously saved methods on any Facebook property with which they are engaged with commerce.

“What we’ve seen for years is that Facebook was going to be a social selling hub and as of today,” Arnold Goldberg, PayPal’s senior vice president of global merchant products and technology, told PYMNTS in a previous interview. “What that translates into is that one-third of social sales are happening on one of Facebook’s properties.”

Goldberg noted the issue was that payments on the properties was a “wild west of sellers and buyers” and the social media platform required a location to allow for “elegant, trustworthy interactions” that wasn’t yet in existence.

Facebook announced the rollout of Facebook Pay in November 2019. The company said at the time, “People already use payments across our apps to shop, donate to causes and send money to each other.”

“Facebook Pay will make these transactions easier while continuing to ensure your payment information is secure and protected,” the company also noted.