Google Pay to Bring Payments Feature to Gmail, Offer Instant Bank Loans in Partnership With Private Banks

Tez, an account-to-account UPI based payment platform has been re-branded as Google Pay recently. The India-specific app will now allow users in India to send money within emails, and also make purchases in its online Play Store.

Google Pay: Bringing Payment Features To Gmail

At the Google annual event which was held earlier this week, Google VP (product management) and head of the Next Billion Users initiative and its Payments, Caesar Sengupta indicated that the platform would be rebranded as Google Pay – its global payments product. Users can access Google Pay across all its apps, courtesy UPI capability under Google Pay. This also means that you can now send money within emails and simultaneously make purchases in its online store.

Payment is an important function in emails and the company aims at bringing the experience to its users in India. Sengupta quoted, “We feel that payment is a core functionality the way email or storage is, which come with every Google account. In some countries, we have a feature in Gmail where you can send money. Those are examples of some of the features we are looking at bringing to Google Pay users in India.”

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Google Pay: Offering Instant Bank Loans

Google has also tied up with major private banks including HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Federal Bank and Kotak Mahindra Bank to provide instant pre-approved loans for its users. “We’re talking to a lot of banks, we’re completely open with who we work with in terms of banking partners,” Sengupta said. The company is hoping that banks will bring their financial capabilities, their understanding of the user and their customers while Google will add its user experience and ability to make complex processes extremely simple and quick.

Also, Google has partnered with Pine Labs, an aggregator that offers credit-acceptance services to major retail chains like Big Bazaar, to accept payments via Google Pay in offline stores. In future, Google Pay is also looking to bolster its partnerships with big Indian offline retailers including the likes of Big Bazaar, e-Zone, and FBB.

Google Pay: Partnership With Banks

The initiative to strike a fruitful partnership with popular banks in the country will set the cat among the pigeons for Paytm which is backed by Japan’s SoftBank and China’s Alibaba and U.S. conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway. Founded by Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Paytm currently runs a payments bank in India and also has plans to expand to selling financial products such as insurance and mutual funds. Besides partnering with banks, Google also hopes that KaiOS – a low-cost phone operating system in which it invested $22 million – will do well in Africa and parts of South East Asia.

“Countries like India, which are mobile first have so many people coming online for the first time, just generate an incredible amount of opportunity for innovation,” Sengupta said.

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The Google Pay experience in India, however, will be different. While in other countries the app works as an e-wallet and allow customers to store card details and use the smartphone’s NFC (Near Field Communication) feature to make contactless payments. Tez, which was introduced initially as a UPI service, post rebranding is looking to integrate several other features, including NFC, for its users in India.

What’s your take on the Google Pay and the offers that Google is bunching along with it? Do you think it will be able to carve success in India and also help the users? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section below.

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