David Marcus is getting out of the payments business. PayPal’s president is leaving his post at the Web’s largest payments processor to join Facebook as its vice president of messaging products.
Marcus has been at PayPal since 2011. He was the founder and CEO of Zong, a mobile payments provider for gaming and social networking companies, before it was acquired by PayPal in July 2011. Marcus also founded Echovox and GTN Telecom, both of which were acquired.
After Zong bought PayPal, Marcus became VP and general manager of mobile at PayPal before being promoted to president of the eBay-owned payments platform in April 2012.
At Facebook, Marcus will take charge of Facebook Messenger. The social giant recently rolled out Messenger into its own stand-alone app for smartphones and tablets outside of the standard Facebook app.
Facebook said in a statement:
Every day around 12 billion messages are sent on Facebook, and in April we announced that Messenger, our standalone messaging app, is now used by more than 200 million people every month. We’re excited by the potential to continue developing great new messaging experiences that better serve the Facebook community and reach even more people, and David will be leading these efforts.
Marcus will definitely fit in with the ethos at Facebook. Marcus is a believer in social media and of company executives engaging with customers via social channels. In an onstage interview at a ReadWrite Mix event earlier this year, Marcus told ReadWrite Editor-in-Chief Owen Thomas his thoughts on being accessible to customers on social media.
“If you lead a company, you’re the master of your calendar,” Marcus said. “You need to know what’s important and what’s not. For me, my customers are my number one priority and that’s it. If someone has an issue, no matter who you are or how big or small you are, it’s our mission to solve it for them. And I’m fanatical about this.”
