Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, plans to integrate the social network’s messaging services — WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger — asserting his control over the company’s sprawling divisions at a time when its business has been battered by scandal.

Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly planning on consolidating all the social network’s messaging apps.

This means users on Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp can message each other across the different platforms without necessarily being on them.

According to a report in The New York Times, these messaging platforms will still be individual apps, but the cohesion will be achieved by unifying their underlying technical infrastructure.

The effort will rearrange the principal ways they all function.

Facebook said it wanted to;

“Build the best messaging experiences we can; and people want messaging to be fast, simple, reliable and private. We’re working on making more of our messaging products end-to-end encrypted and considering ways to make it easier to reach friends and family across networks.”

Plausible reasons for the merger include; increased user engagement, and higher ad revenue generation.

After its acquisition by Facebook in 2014, WhatsApp officially began sharing data with Facebook in August 2016. This combined effort will most likely facilitate increased data sharing between the platforms.