Facebook this week announced it’s testing a feature called Account Center, through which users will be able to sign into Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger, and use a single Facebook Pay ID to make purchases within each of the platforms.

Why should we care?
It appears Account Center is part of a bigger effort to integrate data and user experiences across its various platforms. This includes story and post sharing, authentication, as well as payments. The move is an obvious play to encourage social shopping and purchase activity, while allowing Facebook to gain a deeper understanding of how payment behaviors connect other activities across its platforms. It’s also part of Facebook’s e-commerce push, and builds on the creation of Facebook Financial in August, an initiative to bring together all of its payments initiatives excluding Libra under one organizational unit. “That could also make Facebook's apps that little bit more intertwined, which some see as an insurance policy, in case regulators ever wanted to try and break-up the company due to antitrust concerns,” one analysis of the news said.