Fintech

Forget 'Zuck Bucks.' The real story is Facebook’s financial identity crisis.

Meta’s money business has been called Facebook Payments, Facebook Financial and Novi. It’s settled on Meta Financial Technologies. For now.

Forget 'Zuck Bucks.' The real story is Facebook’s financial identity crisis.

There's massive upheaval in the division that houses Facebook Pay and other financial products.

Image: Unsplash; Protocol

Meta has ditched a short-lived name for its financial division, Novi, in favor of Meta Financial Technologies. It’s just the latest, most visible indicator of the massive upheaval in the division that houses Facebook Pay and other financial products.

Novi was a high-profile bet for Meta. It was originally the name of Facebook’s crypto wallet, a project championed by executive David Marcus, but grew to become the name for the group he oversaw. When the company changed its name to Meta Platforms Inc., Marcus announced that his unit would change its name from Facebook Financial, or F2, to Novi.

But Novi was a strategic failure, dogged by regulatory challenges and global government scrutiny. Marcus abruptly left weeks after announcing the name change. His successor, Stephane Kasriel, quietly revealed the new name on Twitter in March.

Kasriel has also been updating the division’s strategy in what appears to be a major reversal of Marcus’ crypto push. The Financial Times recently reported that employees were calling a non-crypto virtual currency “Zuck Bucks” — a name used a decade ago to describe Facebook Credits, a digital currency used for then-popular games played on top of Facebook’s desktop website.

Such a system would be a throwback to Facebook’s earliest payments efforts. Relying on stored-value accounts similar to PayPal, user wallets holding credits would largely fall under money-transmitter regulations. And Meta has had a corporate infrastructure for conventional payments for over a decade.

Marcus and Kasriel were both intimately familiar with those systems. Marcus founded and Kasriel was an executive at a startup called Zong, which processed mobile payments for purchases of Facebook Credits. Marcus sold that company to PayPal, where he was president before he joined Facebook.

A stored-value system using conventional money would also mean avoiding the regulatory woes that doomed the Novi wallet and its associated crypto stablecoin, Diem. In contentious hearings about Facebook’s cryptocurrency plans, some members of Congress referred to Diem and its predecessor Libra as “Zuck Bucks,” which strongly suggests that the moniker won’t make it off campus.

A Meta job listing for a security engineer doesn’t even mention Novi, instead describing work on an “MFT digital wallet.” A job listing for a data scientist likewise omits mention of Novi. Stephen Rocco Rodi, a Meta spokesperson, said the security engineer job listing was a “mistake” and would be updated to include the Novi name. He added that the Novi wallet remains in a pilot test.

Most of Meta’s recent registrations and licenses were made through its Novi Financial Inc. subsidiary. It remains registered in California as a money transmitter under the Facebook Payments Inc. name, and it has registrations as Facebook Payments International and Facebook Payments Europe for international payments.

One area where Meta could make a big push is in ecommerce payments for purchases on Instagram, Facebook Marketplace and possibly new metaverse environments. One job listing for an MFT strategic merchant manager describes the position’s duties as reducing “barriers that prevent people from driving payments and commerce on Meta.” But Meta faces significant competitors there, including PayPal and Shopify. Many merchants have been reluctant to embrace crypto payments, and the Novi name’s associations with crypto may have proved a drag on Meta’s efforts in ecommerce.

The name did not come cheap, in yet another sign of the importance Meta placed on it. Besides the ongoing expense of removing references to Novi, Meta paid the parent of MetaBank, Meta Financial Group, $60 million last year for Meta-related trademarks. The bank, which is an important partner to many fintech companies, renamed itself Pathward last month.

The abruptness of the change may explain why, a month after Kasriel tweeted it into existence, Meta Financial Technologies has barely any footprint on Meta’s corporate websites. Among other openings, the company is hiring an internal communications manager. That person will work on “building morale, articulating organization and company-wide strategy, building confidence and trust in leadership, and rallying employees around the organization’s ambitious goals.” It will also require someone “comfortable working in ambiguity.”

Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

Keep ReadingShow less
Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

The financial technology transformation is driving competition, creating consumer choice, and shaping the future of finance. Hear from seven fintech leaders who are reshaping the future of finance, and join the inaugural Financial Technology Association Fintech Summit to learn more.

Keep ReadingShow less
FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

It will be the second re:Invent with CEO Adam Selipsky as leader of the industry’s largest cloud provider after his return last year to AWS from data visualization company Tableau Software.

Keep ReadingShow less
Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

As of today, we will not publish any more stories. All of our newsletters, apart from our flagship, Source Code, will no longer be sent. Source Code will be published and sent for the next few weeks, but it will also close down in December.

Keep ReadingShow less
Bennett Richardson

Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

Keep ReadingShow less
Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

Latest Stories
Bulletins