Google Pay’s India Success To Shape Global Payments Product, Says Pichai

Inspired by the growth of Google Pay in India, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said that Google will take the learnings to shape its global digital payments products.

Pichai said the lessons from the success of the unified payments interface (UPI) platform have influenced the course of product development.

Talking about the success of Google Pay in a post-earning call on February 3, the CEO said the digital payments product has registered great traction over the last 18 months. “We had a tremendously successful launch in India from which we learned a lot of features, and we are bringing that and we are revamping our payments products globally,” Pichai said.

Google Pay Rises With UPI

UPI, managed by National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), has become the main mode of digital transactions in India. In December 2019, India noted a 7.37% month-on-month (MoM) growth in UPI payments, accounting for 1.31 Bn transactions.

Going beyond UPI, Google is also planning to add support for bank credit cards and debit cards in India, just like it already has in the US and some other markets.

In November, Google claimed to have achieved over 3X user growth in 12 months, from 22 Mn monthly active users (MAUs) in September last year to 67 Mn in September 2019. The company also noted that two out of three transactions on Google Pay come from over 300K villages, towns and cities. Google Pay made its entry in the Indian market in 2017 and was launched as Google Tez.

Google Wants UPI To Go Global

In December 2019, Google had also recommended that the US Federal Reserve roll out a digital payments system similar to UPI in the states. The global tech giant had also introduced a new interbank real-time gross settlement (RTGS) service called FedNow. The platform was developed on the lines of NPCI’s UPI system.

Google pitched FedNow as a mode of payments that supports inclusive, faster and open digital payments. Meanwhile, NPCI is also planning to take UPI to overseas markets. Two days after Google’s letter to the Federal Reserve, Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor Shaktikanta Das announced that it has set up a subsidiary to take UPI services to other countries.

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