PayPal boss to head Facebook's messaging service

David Marcus, who has led eBay's fast-growing payments unit PayPal for the past two years, will step down this month to run Facebook's messaging products.

Under Mr Marcus, PayPal has moved more aggressively into the physical world by developing a mobile wallet for consumers as well as point-of-sale systems for retailers.

The move marks Facebook's latest effort to bolster its private messaging features as it faces competition from a new crop of popular mobile messaging services such as Snapchat and Line. In February, Facebook stunned observers by announcing plans to acquire messaging service WhatsApp for $19bn.

In the newly created role of vice-president of messaging products, Mr Marcus will oversee the Messenger service within Facebook's social network as well as the free Messenger mobile app. Roughly 12bn messages are sent every day on Facebook, and the Messenger app has more than 200m users, according to the company.

"I'm looking forward to getting my hands dirty again attempting to build something new and meaningful at scale," Mr Marcus said in a post on his LinkedIn page.

The move comes as PayPal, which has 148m active users, faces tougher global competition from Amazon, which launched a recurring payments program earlier on Monday, as well as Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, which is going public later this year.

In a blog post, eBay chief executive John Donahoe said Mr Marcus was leaving behind a strong leadership team and PayPal was on track to meet its outlook for 2015.

eBay shares fell 2pc in after-hours trading.

Meanwhile, Facebook has withdrawn its new photo and video messaging app from Apple's App Store after releasing it accidentally.

The company hopes to officially release Slinghsot, a rival to Snapchat, in the near future.