Meta deepens one-click checkout play with J.P. Morgan

Meta Pay, formerly known as Facebook Pay, is deepening its foray into one-click checkout, pitting it against the likes of Google, Apple, and PayPal.

Driving the news: Meta Pay announced Tuesday that it has partnered with J.P. Morgan Payments, giving merchants in the bank's network the ability to put a "Meta Pay" button on their checkout page.

Why it matters: This is a sign that Meta has an interest in building its fintech capabilities outside of its own ecosystem of apps.

Background: Better known for allowing person-to-person payments and checkout within its apps (Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp), Meta Pay first made its interest in growing even outside of those walls clear with a Shopify partnership last year.

• That gave Shopify merchants the option to have Meta Pay so that customers who have given the social media giant their payment credentials can checkout with a single click.

The big picture: Meta sees the potential to bank the billions of unbanked in the world, with its own platform acting potentially as a critical form of ID — the portal to all financial services — both in the real world and in the metaverse.

• " If you're in the metaverse and wearing a VR headset, you won't want to have to remove that headset and check your phone for a security code. We are exploring ways to make login and authentication better and more seamless in VR," writes Stephane Kasriel, head of commerce of financial technologies at Meta.

Yes, but: One year since its Shopify integration, and Meta Pay's button itself still has limited adoption compared to the likes of Apple and Google, despite its broad reach from Meta's own 3.65 billion users and Shopify's millions of merchants.