Facebook will open in London the first headquarters outside the US to WhatsApp to develop digital payments via the messaging service. Around a hundred people will work in the office.
According to sources, last week Facebook sent a team of engineers to Great Britain to recruit staff in London and Dublin and to support their payment initiative. The employees of Whatsapp’s London office will depend on the headquarters of the parent company in Ireland.
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The choice to focus the development of payments via WhatsApp in the UK stems from multiple factors. One is popularity. WhatsApp in the United States is less used than in Europe. And Great Britain has a very agile legislation for the development of fintech systems.
The task of the new staff will be to create a payment function focused on security and data protection, using end-to-end encryption that already protects messages sent via WhatsApp. ” We look forward to working with some of the best technical and operational experts in London and Dublin to bring WhatsApp into its second decade, ” WhatsApp operations director Matthew Idema.
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At the recently concluded F8 conference, Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, announced that payments via the messaging app will be launched in several countries following the success of the test run in India.
” Payments are one of the areas we have the opportunity to simplify. I think it may be easy to send money to someone in the same way as sending a photo, “Zuckerberg told F8 developer conference. Another step in the direction of creating a Western Wechat, the Chinese app that has become an ecosystem of services far beyond messaging.
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The European WhatsApp team will also work to stem the disinformationspread through the messaging service, creating machine learning systems that can better identify abuse.
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