Facebook sets up mobile payment headquarters in UK

Facebook has been looking for ways to generate revenue from WhatsApp, the world’s most popular instant messaging service.

Since last year, it has been testing mobile payment services in India through the app. India is WhatsApp’s biggest market in the world, with more than 200 million users.

Facebook, the world’s largest social network, has launched a transformation that will focus on mobile payment, e-commerce and other businesses based on mobile chat tools in the future. Industry analysts, Facebook is trying to learn from China’s largest social software WeChat and plans to get more revenue from the transition.




Facebook has chosen London as the home base for the development of its WhatsApp mobile payment service, according to bloomberg.

Facebook has set up a branch in the UK focused on mobile payments, driving the global expansion of WhatsApp’s mobile payment business and accelerating its efforts to make money from this popular instant messaging service.

Facebook has three chat tools: WhatsApp, which it acquired, Messenger, which it developed itself, and Instagram, which also has a photo-social feature. Zuckerberg has previously said that the three chat tools will be integrated at the bottom to achieve connectivity.



A Facebook spokesperson reportedly said the world’s largest social media company chose the UK as the center of its mobile payment plans because it needed to recruit people familiar with the global popularity of WhatsApp, such as India.

WhatsApp has sent engineers to the UK since the end of last year and will continue to recruit 100 new software engineers for its payment business. Most of the new staff will work in London, and some will hold other positions in Dublin.

The launch of WhatsApp’s mobile payment service was reportedly delayed due to regulatory disputes and concerns about malicious content in the service, giving Google’s Google payment and China’s alibaba group holding LTD’s mobile payment Paytm system time to develop their customer base.

Facebook’s new London employees will develop mobile payment tools for WhatsApp, as well as products focused on information security and combating harassment.

As is well known, WhatsApp has adopted an end-to-end encryption approach, which has also become one of the selling points of this service. However, the service still faces a number of functional abuses, such as the malicious distribution of fake news fake information. WhatsApp began limiting the number of retweets it could make to friends in an effort to avoid spreading fake news and sparking social tensions.

Pushing mobile payments could push Facebook into a wider range of financial services, as has been expected since the company hired David Marcus, the former president of PayPal, in 2014 David Marcus. Marcus also became the head of the company’s blockchain program in 2018.

At the recent F8 Development conference, Facebook also said it would further transform itself into private social and mobile chat services, which plans to launch a richer range of services around mobile chat tools while creating revenue opportunities.

There have been previous media reports that Facebook is developing WhatsApp-based mobile payment tools that will use encrypted currencies.

However, cryptocurrencies are not universal globally, and it is unclear whether Facebook will promote cryptocurrency payments in developing markets, including India.