Tag Archives: google pay

Banks, governments and tech need to work together to digitize economies and increase financial inclusion

Editor’s note: This article is a condensed version of a speech Caesar gave at the G20 Finance Leaders Meeting in Japan on Saturday, June 8, 2019.

Let me introduce you to Vijay Babu. Vijay owns a small laundry shop in Bangalore, India. He can’t read or write, but he was eager to go digital to cater to smartphone savvy millennials.

vijay

Vijay Babu used Google Pay, formerly known as Tez in India, to help grow his business.

A year ago, he would have to pay $100 for a credit card terminal, deal with cumbersome printed receipts, and wait days to get paid. That’s no longer the case.  Vijay Babu’s daughter helped him set up Google Pay on his Android smartphone. Today, he’s able to keep track of his transactions better, accept payments remotely and build relationships with his customers through Google Pay’s chat-based interface.

I believe technology is about solving the big problems, not just for a few, but for everyone.

That’s more possible today than ever before because of the smartphone. Smartphones are likely the first electronic device that all of humanity will possess. There are about four billion internet users in the world today, with another one billion coming online in the next few years. Almost all of them will be using smartphones. And here’s what’s amazing about the smartphone in your pocket: Today, it has more computing power and access to information than NASA had in 1969 when they put a man on the moon.

One of the biggest opportunities in front of us is how we apply that technology to the world of money. Whether you are an individual, a business or a country, your ability to access modern financial systems is pivotal to your success.

Unfortunately, in today’s smartphone-enabled, always connected world, payments don’t work for everyone. Younger demographics find banking experiences too antiquated. A recent study showed that 48 percent of millennials in the U.S, are considering moving to a digital only bank, and one in three millennials plan to switch banks in the next 90 days.

On the other hand, there are 2.5 billion adults in the world who are unbanked or underbanked—and the majority of them are women. This lack of access has huge implications for families, children, commerce and society at large. Besides consumers, payment challenges have an outsized impact on small businesses, the backbone of every economy.

We need to use technology and deploy it at scale to solve these hard and real problems. Doing so will help move countries from cash to digital, accelerate economic growth, and drive financial inclusion in economies.

At Google, building for everyone is a core philosophy. We know that we do better when everyone is invited in. Because Android is open source, there are 2.5 billion active Android devices today, made by over 1,300 different companies. And because Android is an open ecosystem, there are more than one million apps on the Google Play store. 

It took a global community to put smartphones in everyone’s hands. Today, it’s time for that global community to come together again to digitize economies.
caesar

Caesar Sengupta speaking at the G20 Finance Leaders Meeting in Japan about how tech, governments and banks serve people better when they work together.

There's a popular but deeply mistaken belief that companies and banks are rivals that are working against each other. We believe that when tech and banks work together as partners, they're better able to help people.

For Google, partnering with banks helps us build products that work for everyone. By using our global infrastructure and technology platform to connect more customers to a formal financial system, we can support governments as they move societies from cash to digital and transform economies.

Four years ago, Prime Minister Narendra Modi called for a Digital India. We supported the Indian government and financial institutions in realizing their vision for payments. With Google tech and our knowledge of user experience, we created a simple payments app to work on the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), India’s real-time payments ecosystem. Since the launch of Google Pay in India (formerly known as Tez), transactions on UPI have increased 43 times, reaching 734 million transactions in May. Now, the cumulative value has overtaken that of credit and debit cards in India.

Google Pay has grown together with the rest of the digital payments ecosystem in India. Now, two out of every three transactions on Google Pay in India take place outside of India’s top six cities in more than 300,000 towns and villages across India made by millions of people like Vijay every day.

Stories like Vijay’s are examples of what is possible when governments, finance and tech work together. Together, we can and absolutely must empower billions more.

Google Pay launches new, dynamic features for Online Payments and Passes APIs

Posted by Stephen McDonald, Google Developers Engineer and Jose Ugia, Google Developers Engineer

At Google I/O 2019, we shared some of the new features we’re adding to Google Pay and discussed how you can use them to add value to your customers—whether you accept payments on your app or website or engage with customers beyond payments through loyalty cards, offers, event tickets, and boarding passes.

Read on for a summary of what we covered during the event. If you want to hear the full story, check out the recordings of our sessions: Building Powerful Checkout Experiences with Google Pay and Engaging Customers Beyond Payments: Tickets, Transit, and Boarding Passes.

Making online payments even more seamless

Better checkout experiences are more likely to increase your conversions. Here’s a look at some of the ways Google Pay can help you improve your checkout process from start to finish.

Dynamic updates for faster checkout

In an effort to bring customers more detail and transparency, we’ve made some changes to the Google Pay API. Going forward, the Google Pay payment sheet will display pricing information, so customers can double-check their order before they confirm their purchase. We’re also adding modifiers based on transaction conditions (like shipping options), so customers can see all relevant purchase details quickly, without going back to the merchant site, leading to a faster checkout experience.

Users paying online can see the price of the order dynamically before they initiate the transaction.

More payment button options

Along with these improvements to the payment sheet, we’re offering creative new button and onboarding options to encourage customers to choose Google Pay for faster checkout. To start, we launched the createButton API for web developers. This enables a dynamic purchase button that uses the right styling and colors and is localized to your user’s device or browser settings. We’ve also been experimenting with personalized buttons that display important information before users enter the checkout flow. For instance, we can show customers exactly what card they’ll be paying with or let them know if they need to sign in or set up Google Pay – and this information is displayed right on the button. As the button is hosted and rendered by Google Pay, all of this happens without you having to make any changes.

createButton API allows to display card information directly on the checkout button

Delivering extra value with Google Pay Passes

The Google Pay API for Passes lets you connect your business to millions of Android users by linking your loyalty programs, gift cards, offers, boarding passes, and event tickets to their Google Accounts. This year, we’re launching new capabilities and integrations that will help you engage customers at more times and places.

High priority notifications for boarding passes

Your passengers can add their boarding pass to Google Pay for a seamless check-in experience. Google Pay sends the passengers a high priority notification with their boarding pass just a few hours before their flight so they can easily access it when needed. They’ll also receive notifications with important dynamic information like gate changes or flight delays. These notifications are high priority and will stay prominent on passengers’ phones until they dismiss it or their flight takes off.

Integration with the Google Assistant

Google’s ecosystem can help create complete user journeys across multiple touchpoints. Earlier this year, we announced the ability to check-in to flights directly from the Google Assistant. Once a flight is ready for check-in, your passenger will receive a notification that takes them directly to the Assistant to complete the process. At the end of this flow, the user is issued a boarding pass that can be accessed from the Assistant or from Google Pay. This is built on top of the Passes API, which means that as an airline, if you already added support for boarding passes, you can just add the check-in with the Assistant integration on top of it.

From left to right: new high priority notifications, integration of Myki card inside of Google Maps, new transit tickets and automatic Gmail import.

An open API for transit, with support for dynamic barcodes

We’re excited to announce we’re making transit an open API. This means if you’re a transit provider and currently offer barcode tickets for your transportation services, you can now utilize the Passes API to get your tickets digitized in Google Pay. We’ll also be enhancing this API to support dynamic barcodes. The barcodes on customers’ transit tickets or passes will update every few seconds – even if their device is offline. This allows you to increase security -- since your QR codes are changing all the time, it makes it harder to duplicate the ticket.

Loyalty Integration with Gmail

Now you can also give customers the opportunity to import your loyalty cards to Google Pay right from Gmail—just by adding some markup to your emails. When customers open the Google Pay app, they’ll be shown any loyalty cards from Gmail they haven’t added to Google Pay. With just a tap, they can add them all automatically so they can access them at any time. This feature is currently only available with loyalty programs, but we’ll be expanding to other types of passes in the future.

What’s next

We’re working on making Passes available to your users on Google even if they haven’t installed the Google Pay app. We are starting with boarding passes and transit tickets, then plan to extend the same functionality to the other Passes. Stay tuned for more.

Resources

To learn more about Google Pay, visit our developer resources:

Your commute just got easier with Google Pay and the Assistant

To make your morning commute easier and less time consuming, we’ve been working with transit agencies in more than 30 cities around the world—from London to Singapore to Moscow—to enable Google Pay and simplify how you ride on public transit. New York City now joins that list of destinations. Starting May 31st, The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) will enable the “pay per ride” feature on your phone with a public pilot at select subway stations and Staten Island buses. And we continue to work with The Metropolitan Transportation Authority to bring more features with Google Maps and Google Assistant to make commuting even easier, no matter your destination.

Using Google Pay on MTA is part of OMNY, a contactless payment fare system that lets you tap and go with either your contactless payment card, or your mobile phone or wearable. When the public pilot opens next week, you’ll be able to use Google Pay to board all Staten Island buses and subway stations along the 4-5-6 lines between Grand Central and Atlantic Avenue-Barclays Center—no need to stand in line for a MetroCard.

Using Google Pay to ride with your phone is simple. No need to open the app or unlock your device—and it’s the same price as a single ride MetroCard. Plus, it’s more secure. You don’t have to worry about losing your MetroCard, and Google Pay doesn’t share your actual credit or debit card number when you pay.                                                        

And starting today, NYC subway riders can take advantage of the Google Assistant’s new real-time transit feature with the MTA. On your Android phone, all smart speakers, or all Smart Displays just say, “Hey Google, when is the next 4 train arriving?” or “Hey Google, when is the next train?” Your Assistant will share the train’s ETA and provide walking directions to the station, making it easier to plan your commute.

Transit updates with Assistant.gif

You can now ask your Google Assistant for live updates on departure times or the MTA.

In the next few weeks, Google Maps will let you see which routes accept Google Pay when you look up directions. And you can see if you’re set up to pay with your phone. If not, you can add a credit or debit card right from the Google Maps app.

Google Maps and Google Pay integration

Google Pay in Google Maps lets users know in advance if they are ready to use their phone to tap and ride.                                              

This feature will roll out across destinations around the world in the next few weeks, including Melbourne’s myki transit system, the New York City area’s MTA and London’s TfL. Download the Google Pay Android app to try it on transit today.

All you need to know about Google Pay if you’re a developer

Posted by Jose Ugia, Developer Programs Engineer

Google Pay is designed to make transactions simple from contactless payments to online purchases and even peer-to-peer payments. It also allows users to store tickets and passes, manage loyalty cards and keep track of transactions. With Google Pay, users can pay with all credit and debit cards saved to their Google Account, making hundreds of millions of cards enabled for faster checkout in your apps or websites. This includes payments for goods and services on e-commerce merchants, online marketplaces and Android apps.

When you integrate the Google Pay API into your app or site, your customers can then transact using any of those cards in as few as two clicks.

Ways to pay with Google Pay

When users use their NFC-enabled mobile device or smart watch to pay in places such as supermarkets, restaurants or shops, the card selected is emulated from the device using a secure number that changes on every transaction. Only the bank or card issuer can decrypt this number to process the transaction. The process of securing your card details is called tokenization. Only cards from supported banks can be tokenized, and this is a necessary step to pay contactless using Google Pay.

Users can pay in-stores using NFC-enabled devices with forms of payment that support tokenization.

In contrast, when users pay in your app or on your site through Google Pay, they can select any card saved to their Google Account, including tokenized cards. This enables users to pay on any device in your sites and apps globally.

Users paying online can use any card saved under their Google account(s).

All forms of payments are stored in the user's Google account and protected by multiple layers of security. This includes payment methods that users have already saved to pay for services like YouTube, Google Play or to speed up checkout forms using Chrome Autofill.

Why add Google Pay to your app or site?

You can integrate Google Pay's online APIs to increase conversions by providing a more convenient, more secure and faster way to pay to your users. Some of the benefits include:

  • Simplify the checkout experience so users don’t have to remember their payment details, making the checkout process faster and reducing the percentage of abandonments.
  • Increase security by encrypting users’ choice of payment before it is sent back to your app. You can also use it to charge orders directly from your servers or payment processor.
  • Enable payments on multiple surfaces to provide more flexibility to your users. This also allows you to easily enable payments on other Google surfaces like the Google Assistant.
  • Increase conversions for new users by reducing friction for those who do not have an account on your app or site. The APIs support returning information like billing and shipping addresses in addition to forms of payment if needed to process an order.

Integrating Google Pay

Adding Google Pay to your site or application is just a few lines of code away. There are tutorials on how to integrate Google Pay in your website or Android app and step-by-step guided codelabs for Web and Android. Here is a more visual tutorial:

To get started, use this integration checklist (Android | Web) to make sure you have everything you need to complete the integration. When you’re ready to go live with your integration, request production access and follow the final steps to deploy your app (Android | Web) in a production environment.

Google Pay and the Payment Request API

The Payment Request API is a Web Payments W3C standard that provides a native browser experience for collecting payment information from the user. You can accept Google Pay via PaymentRequest directly, however this may not be available across browsers.

To enable Google Pay for your users across all major browsers with a single implementation, we recommend using the Google Pay JavaScript library as described above. This enables a native Payment Request experience on Chrome, while giving you the flexibility of supporting Google users on other browsers.

The payments sheet is presented natively when triggered from a browser with support for Payment Handler API (on the right), while it falls back to showing a pop-up on browsers that don’t.

As users’ needs evolve, we continue to add features and forms of payment to the Google Pay API –like the recent addition of PayPal– so you can get access to these new payment methods in your app or site without any additional development work.

Tune in to Google Pay at Google I/O 2019

Don’t miss Google Pay sessions at Google I/O this year to learn about the latest features we are bringing to Google Pay. Bookmark our sessions and check back for livestream details–we look forward to seeing you this week.

A year already! Time flies when the journey is exciting! And we owe it to you

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/VjaWsOmprKa_rGROatIDQETHASwn3ZDpGlC0DO15DNDY-LQrAFz2xsR8crMYEnTFwuhDHt_icYKQgdAtchfXSCy6O--NSgV8yt8PIoE-iKqAcjsUBh5sm5wqFkaX0K6SmBcD2yOe Caesar Sengupta Vice President Payments and Next Billion Users




On September 18, 2017, we launched Google Pay in India (then known as Tez). We set out with a mission: make digital payments simple. But this journey would not have been possible without you, the 25 million monthly active Google Pay users and 1.2 million businesses in India, who have responded wholeheartedly and helped us move forward.


From Kanyakumari to Mandvi to Dimapur, you are using Google Pay for your bills, your rent, the chaiwallah, the plumber, and even your bus rides. Or you’re simply sending money home or splitting bills with your friends. Google Pay has enabled over 860 million transactions in the last year — safely and securely. And if you used Tez mode, powered by Google’s Audio QR technology, you sent money without sharing your number or bank account. Google Pay always has users’ privacy in mind, and you will always be in control of your data. We keep you informed about what data we collect, how it’s used, and why. And we build powerful data controls into your Google Account, so you can choose the privacy settings that are right for you.





Security is a key part of Google Pay. Google’s expertise in security and machine learning backs every transaction, and it’s working 24/7 to help detect spam, fraud, prevent hacking, and verify and protect the identity of every user. Your account is also protected by your phone security safeguards such as passcodes or fingerprint IDs, as well as a Google PIN code. And if you ever need help, our customer service team is available all day, every day by phone or chat support.


We owe a big thank you to the banking industry for believing in us, especially our four payment service provider partners, Axis Bank, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank and the State Bank of India who came on board this journey early on. We made history together by building a first-of-its-kind, multiple payment service providers (MSPs) platform. And of course a huge thank you to the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) for creating the infrastructure that enabled this. Since the launch of Google Pay, India’s monthly UPI transactions have grown 18X to 312M in August— making India one of the world’s leading innovators in digital payments.




It’s been quite a journey since Prime Minister Modi and IT Minister Shri RS Prasad called on Google to support digital payments and financial inclusion in India and a year since the launch of Tez by the Finance Minister Shri Arun Jaitley. But there is a lot more to be done. Barely a 100 million or so Indians are using digital payments. We have over a billion more Indians to empower. That will take a lot of hard work, deep investment and the best technology and ideas from India and around the world.


We are excited to continue working with the government and industry players to innovate and bring the benefits of a digital India to everyone.

Posted by Caesar Sengupta, Vice President, Payments and Next Billion Users, Google

Building with Google Pay

Posted by Gerardo Capiel and Varouj Chitilian, Google Pay

Today's customers want to get things done faster than ever, whether they're ordering groceries or shopping for a new pair of shoes. With Google Pay, we want to ensure checkout doesn't slow them (or your conversions) down, while enhancing the customer experience at every step of the way.

Last week at Google I/O, we announced some exciting new features that do just that. We also shared the latest ways developers can use Google Pay to offer the best experiences at checkout and beyond—all available for free with our APIs. Here are some of the highlights and how you can make the most of them.

More places for customers to check out online

We've started rolling out support for checking out with Google Pay regardless of your browser or device. This means customers can pay with Google Pay on most major browsers from any device.

Enabling this functionality within your apps and sites is simple. Watch Google Pay software engineer Tony Chen do a website integration live on stage, then try it yourself using our developer docs.

But making checkout easier for your customers doesn't just apply to how they pay. Chrome Autofill helps customers fill in forms automatically, so they can speed through the entire checkout process without getting bogged down by typing. To ensure your shoppers are getting the fastest checkout experience with Chrome Autofill, we recommend you check out our new best practices guide.

We'll also be making it easier for customers to manage their payment methods in Google Pay by adding this functionality to our iOS and desktop experiences as well. The new functionality will allow people to add cards and see transactions whenever and wherever it's most convenient for them, giving you access to a new group of customers who will be able to use Google Pay within your apps and sites. It also means that customers who add cards from a laptop can use those cards with Google Pay on an iOS device. (Try it for yourself at g.co/pay/demo.)

This new functionality will be launching soon, and you can learn more about it in our Build with Google Pay session.

Mobile tickets and passes with the Google Pay API for Passes

Building off our newly-launched support for prepaid transit passes, we're now also supporting a new way for you to save and manage passes through our Google Pay API for Passes. This lets you create mobile event tickets and boarding passes that your customers can save to the Google Pay Android app. We've piloted this feature with Southwest, Fortress GB, and Ticketmaster, with more partners coming soon. Want to get on board? Sign up for more information.

Transactions come to Actions on Google

Actions on Google lets developers engage billions of users across the Google Assistant and soon Google Search, Android, and other surfaces by developing Actions and linking them with our ever-growing intents catalog. One of our sessions shows you how you can enable Google Pay in your Actions so your customers can make purchases with their Assistant across multiple surfaces, including mobile devices, Google Home, and soon, Smart Displays. Transactions are now available in Australia, Canada, Japan, France, Germany, the United States, and the United Kingdom. (We'll be bringing them to Brazil, India, Italy, and Spain soon.)

Plus, we're starting a developer preview where you can now enable transactions to sell digital content on the Google Assistant. That includes in-app purchases, subscriptions, games, experiences, and premium content.

We can't wait to see all of the creative ways you use Google Pay to amplify your business and build better checkout experiences for your customers. Be sure to check out all of our I/O sessions for more ideas, tools, and tips. In the meantime, we'll be hard at work on new features to keep making Google Pay the best experience possible—for you and your customers.