#socialpaymentainfo

Facebook thinks making payments should be as easy as sending a photo. But rolling out that service for more than a billion users isn’t something the social network’s executives think it can do on its own.

“We don’t believe we are a payments company—we don’t believe we have the skills to be a payments company,” Paulette Rowe, Facebook’s global head of payment and financial services partnerships, said today at the Money 20/20 Europe conference in Amsterdam. “What we do want to do is to partner.”

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has acknowledged the company’s ambitions to ramp up its payment offerings. A successful payments business, after all, could help Facebook diversify away from its dependence on advertising based on collecting personal data. The company recently launched a checkout service on Instagram so users can pay for things without leaving the app. Facebook also has 1 billion people using a beta version of WhatsApp payments in India, and it recently picked London as a hub for its drive to expand WhatsApp payments globally.