What is likely to be Facebook’s overall payments strategy?

The fork in the road for Facebook: DIY or Partner up?

There are many avenues of approach that Facebook can take. A lot many people have been hellbent on the opinion that Facebook would not get into payments, stigmatizing them for Facebook Credits. I on the other hand have been saying for years that Facebook will get into payments and feel vindicated when David Marcus made the move (See: Page on faisalkhan.com)

To top it all, there was a slip-of-the-tongue by Mark Zuckerberg during an investors call, where the issue of payments came up (See: Mark Zuckerberg Got A Little Snippy When Asked Why A ‘Payments Guy’ Is Running Messenger). There essentially four companies that have the adoption rate, muscle, and brand-power to change the face of payments:

• Facebook
• Google
• Amazon
• Apple

(See article: The Great Tech War Of 2012). These four companies are the giants. The card schemes are demigods and everyone else (PayPal, Square, etc.) are just plain noise (yes, surprise surprise, no eBay in the list of short-listed candidates).

So the question is what will Facebook release - as a payments product?

They have a couple of solid options for the route they will take, and I think they will start with their Messenger Wallet - I'm convinced this would be the first roll-out. The wallet will be no different from the wallet WeChat by Tencent has (See: WeChat is going to be huge for payments (unlike WhatsApp)). The wallet is simply links your credit/debit cards, bank account(s) to the wallet to load/off-load money.

Their second offering could most likely be a partnership with the likes of Western Union for remittances (See: Faisal Khan's answer to Why are start-ups or Facebook itself not using Facebook's large user base for money-transfer services?)

They will most likely compliment this with the ability to pay for products/services on Facebook store. Be able to setup a store seamlessly on Facebook by using credit/debit cards and or via your Messenger wallet. They will most likely come out with a secure element, just like Apple will announce shortly on September 9th 2014, of being able to treat the card transaction online as a card-present transaction.

The fourth offering could be a Facebook branded credit/debit card to compliment the physical world payments and online payments off-site.

Bonus: As a bonus, Facebook could partner up with the likes of Coinbase or Circle to offer bitcoins.