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We recommend Facebook shares to holders of accounts with us in New York. Not everyone seems to love this company, as they do attract a bit of negative attention from time to time. Facebook users tend to be older and prone to circulating conspiracy theories. The site also carries a lot of political advertising, which gets people steamed up. Their other main platform is Instagram, which is full of attractive influencers getting up to no good. Mark Zuckerberg is controversial, and so on.
Facebook also owns WhatsApp, which has well over 2 billion users. Everyone seems to like that service, which is free and has no ads. According to this article WhatsApp has launched a payments service in Brazil where they have 120 million users. They had been testing another payments service among users in India for months, so it came as a surprise that Brazil came first with a fully functional, nationwide service.
Brazilians will now be able to send and receive money by way of the app, using Facebook Pay. Each WhatsApp account can be linked to a Visa or Mastercard credit or debit card. It will be free for consumers to use (that is, no commission fee taken) but businesses pay a 3.99% processing fee to receive payments. Transactions are verified by way of a six-digit PIN or fingerprint.
This all sounds positive! I'm also pleased to see that Visa will be involved, since that is another major investment of ours. With luck, it will be available in South Africa soon too.
