Confirmed: Facebook Messenger will eventually do payments

Now we have confirmation on why Facebook hired PayPal’s David Marcus: Payments and Messenger will eventually “overlap,” Zuckerberg said during today’s earnings call.

When the company first announced it had hired Marcus, the former president of PayPal, the industry took it as a strong hint that Facebook was looking to monetize its messaging app. After all, Marcus joined PayPal after parent-company eBay acquired his mobile-payments startup Zong in 2011, first leading PayPal’s mobile efforts before taking the lead as president.

While monetization speculations were broad at the time, Zuckerberg’s confirmation that payments will come to Messenger someday is almost too obvious now.

But what Facebook will do with WhatsApp, a hugely popular messaging app the company acquired a few months ago, is still unclear. Facebook has maintained that it will keep it separate for the time being, but really, who knows?

The company posted a strong second quarter results today with $2.910 billion in revenue, and about $1.66 billion in mobile advertising revenue, or roughly 62 percent of Facebook’s total advertising revenue.