Facebook rebrands its fintech unit as Novi

This comes close on the heels of its announcements a couple of weeks back that it would be rebranding to Meta in a bid to enter into the virtual world in a major manner in the coming months. It is likely to build its metaverse with all associated tools and one of its prime targets would be to handle payments within the metaverse. That is likely to be done through its crypto wallet Novi and crypto token Diem. It seems to be a part of its ploy to take the users to a parallel world where it can make its own rules and that would not be strictly controlled by the regulators. Its crypto projects have run into serious trouble with the authorities in recent times and by creating a metaverse and making its crypto wallet and token the ones of choice, it would be able to bypass these issues in the future.

The company is unifying its payments and financial services unit as well as products under the Novi brand. Its financial services are quite varied at this time with checkouts from merchants and companies, enabling publishers to buy ads as well as facilitating cross-border payments and all of these would come under the Novi brand henceforth.

“Some of these products are branded Facebook Pay, some are unbranded, and our wallet operates under the Novi brand. So over time, we will unify all existing and future payments and financial services experiences under the Novi brand,” said David Marcus, the leader of Novi.

Novi also has plans to disrupt the payments industry once it manages to have enough traction. Facebook, with its size and its network, would be able to allow cheaper payment mechanisms and also enter into social commerce as then it would easily be able to allow for its content creators to be rewarded directly by its users through Facebook Pay and other means. Its reach would make it a truly global player in the payments industry within a very short period and this is going to be a challenge for the existing players in the payments industry.