Google Pay’s success in India guides Pichai to revamp payments globally in 2020

Bullish on Google Pay and its rising adoption in India, Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the company has taken cues from the successful experience in the country and would soon roll out its revamped digital payments product globally.

Two years after debuting in India, Google's digital payment platform Google Pay hit 67 million monthly active users (MAUs) in India in September last year, driving transactions worth over $110 billion on an annualized basis with hundreds of thousands of offline and online merchants.

The growth in 2018-19 was largely due to the steep growth in Unified Payments Interface (UPI)-based digital payments.

"We've had a lot of traction with our payments product over the past 18 months. We had a tremendously successful launch in India from which we learnt a lot of features, and we are bringing that and we are revamping our payments products globally," Pichal said during an earnings call late Monday as Google revealed for the first time its YouTube ads and Google Cloud numbers.

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Among UPI, Google Pay contributed 59 per cent, PhonePe contributed 26 per cent, followed by Paytm (7 per cent) and BHIM (6 per cent) in digital transactions in 2019, according to a latest report by financial services company Razorpay.

"I'm excited by that (digital payments) rollout, which is coming up in 2020. I think that will make the experience better," Pichai further said.

According to Ambarish Kenghe, Director, Product Management, Google Pay, the vast majority of India's over 60 million small businesses are still not benefiting from the growing digital economy.

The company has also launched a new app called GPay for Business -- a free and easy way for small and medium-sized merchants to enable digital payments without the hassle of time-consuming onboarding and verification process.