Aug. 11 (UPI) — Facebook unveiled Monday a new leadership team for Facebook Pay ahead of a broad roll out in the United States on Instagram.
David Marcus, co-creator of Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency project, will head up the new group, called F2, which is short for Facebook Financial, Bloomberg first reported.
Stephane Kasriel, a former CEO of freelancing platform UpWork, and former PayPal executive, will serve as payments vice president.
The social media company launched Facebook Pay in November with the goal of allowing users to make payments across its suite of applications with initial roll out on Facebook and Messenger. It recently started rolling out Facebook Pay in WhatsApp in Brazil. And it plans to roll out Facebook Pay on Instagram in the coming weeks in the United States.
Facebook also introduced a digital wallet for the Libra network of cryptocurrency to help people send money across the world under the name Calibra in June of last year.
In May of this year, the digital wallet was renamed and re-branded as Novi, after criticism with policymakers concerned about virtual currency disrupting the global financial system and risk of money laundering and competing with the U.S. dollar.
Marcus testified before skeptical lawmakers at a Senate banking committee last summer, members of which were concerned about misuse and money laundering.
He said Libra is backed on a one-to-one basis through cash bank deposits, short term government securities and hard currencies, and the entire system would be fully vetted before launch.
