(8 May 2019 – United Kingdom) Facebook has announced its plans to bring payments to its WhatsApp messaging service and has settled on London as the base for the new team.
Having trialled P2P payments in India, where WhatsApp is most popular, the platform plans to begin rolling out the feature in several countries over the next year, Mark Zuckerberg confirmed last week.
“Payments is one of the areas where we have an opportunity to make it a lot easier. I believe it should be as easy to send money to someone as it is to send a photo,” the Facebook CEO said at the firm's developer conference.
Facebook is also working on a stablecoin that would be pegged to major international currencies and used to send payments across the social media giant's messaging apps – WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook is planning to launch a full payments network and is in discussions with Visa and Mastercard, payments processors such as First Data as well as large e-commerce merchants to support the launch. It has also held talks with major banks over raising $1 billion to bolster the coin against major currency fluctuations.