Meta started renaming its products after the company switched its name: The Oculus Quest and Facebook Portal devices, for instance, are now known as the Meta Quest and Meta Portal. It's only natural for the company to also plan the future of its payments experience as it continues to expand into the metaverse, and that includes a name change for it. Stephane Kasriel, Meta's head of fintech services, has revealed in a longer post about the metaverse that the company is soon renaming Facebook Pay to Meta Pay.
Kasriel said that Meta is "in the very early stages of scoping out what a single wallet experience might look like." While it has no concrete plans yet, Meta is looking into how you can prove who you are and how you can carry that identity into different metaverse experiences. The company is also examining how you can store and bring your digital goods wherever you go in the metaverse and how you can pay friends and businesses easily with your chosen payment method.
Kasriel oversees the company's financial division, which includes the Novi crypto wallet. Former Facebook exec David Marcus spent years trying to get Novi off the ground, but the wallet launched without support for the Diem cryptocurrency that he co-founded. In the end, Marcus stepped down in 2021 and Kasriel renamed the division as Meta Financial Technologies when he took over.
Facebook's name change signified a new era for the company that's now pinning its future on virtual reality and the metaverse. It hasn't been smooth sailing for the internet giant, though. In 2021, Meta's Reality Labs division that serves as home to its hardware and metaverse initiatives lost $10 billion and will hire fewer employees this year as a result. More recently, Reutersreported that the division will be axing some of its projects and postponing others, because it could no longer afford some of the initiatives it originally planned.