PayPal President David Marcus Jumps Ship to Run Messaging at Facebook

Facebook has poached David Marcus, the executive who runs the PayPal online-payment business at eBay, to run its messaging products.

Marcus has been with PayPal since the company bought gaming-payments startup Zong in 2011.

Though Marcus's background has been in payments, Facebook said in a newsroom post that it was hiring him to improve its messaging business:

"Messaging is a core part of Facebook’s service and key to achieving our mission of making the world more open and connected," the company said. "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.

Of course, there has been speculation that Facebook itself would get into the online-payments business itself, though neither Marcus nor Facebook suggested that was behind the hiring.