“Facebook has unveiled a unified payments service designed to provide “a convenient, secure and consistent payment experience across Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp”. “People already use payments across our apps to shop, donate to causes and send money to each other,” the company says. “Facebook Pay will make these transactions easier while continuing to ensure your payment information is secure and protected.””

“Facebook wants to provide more financial advice. A recently approved patent from the company highlights a tool to “compare a user’s financial transactions to financial transactions of a group.” Simply, Facebook is offering a financial planning tool that allows users to benchmark their financial habits against their peers’ behavior.”

“There’s a strategic cost to the defection of Visa, Stripe, eBay, and more from the Facebook-led cryptocurrency Libra Association. They’re not just names dropping off a list. Each potentially made Libra more useful, ubiquitous, or reputable. Now they could become obstacles to the token’s launch or growth. Fearing regulators’ inquiries not just into their Libra involvement but the rest of their businesses, these companies are pulling out at least for now. None had made precise commitments to integrating Libra into their products, and they’ve said they could still get involved later. But their exit clouds the project’s future and leaves Facebook to absorb more of the blowback.”

“Facebook has set up a new financial technology company in Switzerland focusing on blockchain and payments as well as data analytics and investing, Geneva’s commercial register shows.  Libra Networks, with Facebook Global Holdings as stakeholder, was registered in Geneva on May 2 to provide financial and technology services and develop related hardware and software, plans submitted on the Swiss register reveal.”

“The inner workings of Facebook’s blockchain team are still shrouded in secrecy, but it’s staffing up, according to people familiar with the group. Those people said that its product, which Bloomberg earlier reported will be a type of cryptocurrency, could be announced as soon as next quarter. Launched last May, Facebook’s blockchain unit now counts 50 employees. A significant number of those employees-about one in five-used to work at a single company: PayPal Holdings . This quasi-reunion, driven by the group’s leader, former PayPal president David Marcus, is the latest signal of Facebook’s wider ambitions to integrate payments into its platform.”

“Facebook is in talks with financial institutions about possible mobile-payment collaborations in Africa, says Carolyn Everson, a vice-president at the social networking group. In 2018, Absa partnered with Facebook’s popular WhatsApp messaging platform to launch the world’s first chat-banking service. The platform lets customers make peer-to-peer payments or pay utility bills, among other features. “It’s gone really well with customers,” Jason Quinn, Absa’s group financial director, told Business Day on Monday. Everson said Facebook would consider other similar products following this “break-through case study”.”

“Mark Zuckerberg recently revealed that commerce is a huge part of the 2019 road map for Facebook’s family of apps. But before people can easily buy things from Instagram  etc., Facebook needs their credit card info on file. That’s a potentially lucrative side effect of Instagram’s plan to launch a Fundraiser sticker in 2019. Facebook’s own Donate buttons have raised $1 billion, and bringing them to Instagram’s 1 billion users could do a lot of good while furthering Facebook’s commerce strategy.”

“On the afternoon of Tuesday, September 25, our engineering team discovered a security issue affecting almost 50 million accounts. We’re taking this incredibly seriously and wanted to let everyone know what’s happened and the immediate action we’ve taken to protect people’s security.”

“As recently as last year, the social-media company pressed financial firms for the ability to use customer data flowing through its Messenger platform for a range of purposes, including advertising, according to people familiar with the matter and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Concerned about privacy, several firms negotiated bespoke agreements that limited how Facebook could use any financial information that would pass through its servers.”

“Facebook spokesperson Elisabeth Diana tells TechCrunch it’s not asking for credit card transaction data from banks and it’s not interested in building a dedicated banking feature where you could interact with your accounts. It also says its work with banks isn’t to gather data to power ad targeting, or even personalize content such as which Marketplace products you see based on what you buy elsewhere.”

“Facebook is banning all ads that promote cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin, in an effort to prevent people from advertising what the company is calling “financial products and services frequently associated with misleading or deceptive promotional practices.” That means no advertiser — even those that operate legal, legitimate businesses — will be able to promote things like bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, initial coin offerings — ICOs for short — or binary options, according to a Facebook blog post.”