Facebook Pay will be the new nomenclature for Meta's fintech head, Stephane Kasriel, posted in a blog. According to him, the firm is focusing on enhancing payment experiences it already offers in regions where Facebook Pay already has good adoption rather than expanding into new countries.

Meta is also considering how it can make the experience of making payments across all of its platforms, thereby making the experience more available and streamlined to make and process payments in the metaverse. Kasriel admitted this was "still really early-stage" work at Meta around the notion of a wallet. In defining what is part of those early stages of thinking on this subject, he outlined that part of that revolves around "how you establish who you are, so you carry that identity with you as you go from experience to experience within the metaverse".

The company is also considering how you can store the digital goods you own and take them with you wherever you go. Lastly, the company is looking at how you can pay easily and with the payment method you want, whether that's to a friend or making a purchase from a business or creator. The company plans to share more on this in the future.

Our path forward is rooted in our mission to empower everyone, everywhere to access the world's financial system to speed financial inclusion and economic empowerment," Kasriel writes. "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.". According to Facebook, once that foundation is in place, the metaverse's potential and what it can take fintech next will be limitless.

According to Facebook, the social media giant has been into payments since 2009. People use its platforms to make payments in 160 countries and 55 currencies, including person to person, business to business, and business to consumer payments.

The Facebook corporation changed its branding to Meta in October to embrace the company's core ambition more fully, which is building the metaverse. From then on, Meta started renaming its products in terms of the new corporate branding. For example, Oculus Quest is now Meta Quest and Facebook Portal is now Meta Portal. It would be sensible for Meta to make the same for the payments experience as it is entering the metaverse.

A user of the new system will sign up for a Meta account and a "Meta Horizon Profile," which will replace the Oculus account and will house things such as the avatar and username the user uses in the Quest ecosystem. Most interesting about the change, however, is that Meta is going from a "Friends" to a "Followers" model with the Horizon profile, and it's worth noting that new Meta accounts for minors ages 13 through 17 will remain private by default. It has also been hamstrung in its efforts to bring TikTok-like functionality to Facebook and more amateur creators along with it by having a dominantly private account network. If the company can get new users to opt to public by default from the get-go, the company will have much wider options in the content they serve up over time.

For now, the scope of Meta accounts appears limited to VR logins, but it's clear that the company has wider interest in jettisoning Facebook from the center of its user-facing world.