Facebook has been in the payments business for some time now, at least on paper, but has never come to market with the global laser-focused payments strategy that everyone was waiting for. Facebook Financial, or F2, has not been a major theme for Facebook, but more like a note in the margin, enabling payments here and there across the Facebook metaverse. Some of these payments functions are branded as Facebook Pay, and some aren’t branded at all. The fact that F2 processed $100 billion in payments last year give you an idea of just how big the metaverse is.
As Facebook rebrands itself as Meta, F2 is following suit and rebranding itself as Novi, the fintech unit of Meta. According to David Marcus, CEO of Novi, all the payment functions that operate in the metaverse will become Novi-branded, coming together to form a brand with the ability to serve customers beyond what is now the Facebook platform.
“Our mission remains to empower everyone, everywhere to access the world’s financial system to accelerate financial inclusion and economic empowerment,” says Marcus.
Scaling Novi will take some time, but ultimately it wants to leverage the customer base it has built on Facebook, and deliver a value-driven suite of services that both consumers and merchants will use outside of the Metaverse. Worth noting is that both Amazon and PayPal have announced similar strategies, and also have a significant head start with sizable user bases. It will be interesting to see if Novi tries to tackle these giants head-on, or instead develops a suite of products that allows it to co-exist in an adjacent space where consumers and merchants use Novi products that compliment another banking services provider.
Overview by Don Apgar, Director, Merchant Services Advisory Practice at Mercator Advisory Group
