San Francisco, Aug 11 (IANS): The social networking giant on Monday announced to hire former PayPal executive Stephane Kasriel to head its Facebook Pay service, along with unveiling a new group to pursue payments and commerce opportunities.

Called F2 internally, short for Facebook Financial, the team will run all payments projects, including Facebook Pay, reports Detroit News.

Facebook's cryptocurrency head David Marcus, who is reported to run the new payment group, announced the news on Twitter.

"Today we're creating a new group to look after all things payments/FS @Facebook (FB Pay, Novi, WhatsApp payments, ...). With that, I'm excited to welcome @skasriel to look after FB Payments. No changes @Novi, which I'll continue to lead directly," Marcus tweeted.

Novi is the division that is building a digital wallet to hold the Libra cryptocurrency.

"We have a lot of commerce stuff going on across Facebook. It felt like it was the right thing to do to rationalize the strategy at a company level around all things payments,": Marcus was quoted as saying.

Facebook in November last year launched a new payments system that will work across its app ecosystem -- Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp.

Facebook Pay supports most major credit and debit cards as well as PayPal.