Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has said the company is planning new tools for commerce and payments in 2020, as well as a new computing platform featuring augmented and virtual reality (AR and VR).

The social media giant’s quarterly results revealed that more than 2.9 billion people and more than 140 billion small businesses worldwide are now using Facebook’s platforms, including the WhatsApp and Instagram social media networks.

However, the company posted its slowest-ever revenue growth for last three months of 2019, at 25 per cent as its expansion matures and it continues to invest in data privacy.

In a post summarising his quarterly update call, Zuckerberg, who founded the social network in 2004, wrote: “Over the next several years, we're focused on building out a private social platform and more communities, new tools for commerce and payments, and the next computing platform with augmented and virtual reality.”

He said that commerce and payments would be an important element of the company’s private social platform and across all of Facebook’s apps, following a successful trial of WhatsApp Payments in India in 2018. He said the company expects to start rolling the service out in a number of countries and making progress elsewhere in the next six months.

“You’re going to be able to send money as quickly and easily as sending a photo,” Zuckerberg explained. “Beyond WhatsApp Payments, we're working on several other efforts to help facilitate more commerce, from Facebook Marketplace to Instagram Shopping to our work on Facebook Pay.”

He also outlined the company’s determination to push ahead with the development of digital currency and payments system Libra, which has drawn criticism from regulators and central banks over its potential to disrupt the global financial system.

More widely, Zuckerberg said that digital commerce and payments was “such a big space and it's important for empowering people” that the company was taking a number of different approaches, ranging from people buying and selling to each other directly, to businesses setting up storefronts, and people engaging with businesses directly through messaging.

He said the company was looking into “a number of things on payments ranging from using existing national systems like India's UPI to creating new global systems”, and, while he admitted that augmented reality products are “a number of years away”, the company had been working on delivering an AR and VR computing platform which gives the user an impression of the ‘presence’ of another person in another place.

“This is the holy grail of social experiences and it’s going to let us build things we've only dreamed of for the last 15 years – like letting people interact as if they're in person together no matter where they are, or letting people live wherever they want and hologram into work so they can access opportunities anywhere and don't have to move to a city or another country for a job.”

He emphasised that 2020 was set to be a busy year with the company “very focused” on its integrity and transparency policies ahead of the US presidential elections. His comments follow criticism of the company’s efforts to crackdown on fake news and deep fake videos of political figures.

Zuckerberg also reiterated his calls for clearer and tougher regulatory action from governments to assist social media companies in policing the data privacy and political advertising issues that have plagued the company since the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

“There should be a more democratic process for determining these rules and regulations,” he stated. “For these issues, it's not enough for us to just make principled decisions, the decisions also need to be seen as legitimate and reflecting what the community wants.

“That's why I've called for clearer regulation for our industry – and until we get clearer rules or establish other mechanisms of governance, I expect we and our whole industry will continue to face a very high level of scrutiny.”

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