Google today is launching a major redesign of its Google Pay app on Android and iOS. Like similar phone based contactless payment services, Google Pay or Android Pay as it was known back then: it started as a basic replacement for your credit card. Over time, the company has added a few more features, but the overall goal has never changed. After around five years on the market, Google Pay now has around 150 million users in 30 countries. With today's update and redesign, Google keeps all core features intact, but is also taking the service in a new direction with a strong emphasis on helping you manage your personal finances (and maybe even getting a deal here. and the).
Google is also working with 11 banks to launch a new type of bank account in 2021. Called Plex, these mobile bank accounts will have no monthly fees, overdraft charges or minimum balances. Banks will own the accounts, but the Google Pay app will be the primary channel for managing these accounts. The launch partners for this are Citi and Stanford Federal Credit Union.
"What we're doing in this new Google Pay app, he thinks is combining three things into one," said Google Director of Product Management Josh Woodward as he walked me through a demo of the new app. "The three things are three tabs in the app. One is the ability to pay friends and businesses very quickly. The second is to explore offers and rewards, so you can save money in stores. And the third is to get information about your shopping in so you can keep track of your money. "
Paying friends and businesses was obviously always at the heart of Google Pay, but the emphasis here has shifted slightly. "You will notice that everything in the product is built around your relationships," Caesar Sengupta, Google's lead for payments and the next billion users, told me. "It's not about long lists of transactions or weird numbers. All your commitments revolve around people, groups and companies ".
Perhaps unsurprisingly then, the feature that is now featured in the app is P2P payments. You can also still pay and request money through the app as usual, but as part of this review, Google is now making it easier to split restaurant bills with friends, for example, or rent and utilities with yours. roommates and see who already paid and who is still delinquent. Woodward tells me that Google created this feature after its user research showed that bill splitting remains a sore point for its users.
In this same view, you can also find a list of companies you've recently transacted with, using Google Pay's tap-and-pay feature, or why you've linked your credit card or bank account to the service. From there, you can see all your recent transactions with those companies.
Perhaps the most important new feature that Google is enabling with this update is the ability to link your bank and credit card accounts to Google Pay so that it can enter information about your spending. It's basically a mint light within the Google Pay app. This is what allows the company to offer many of the other new features in the app. Google says it's working with "a few different aggregators" to enable this feature, although it hasn't gone into details on who its partners are. It's worth pointing out that this, like all the new features here, is off by default and on.
The basic idea here is similar to that of other personal finance aggregators. In its simplest form, it lets you see how much money you have spent and how much you still have. But Google is also using its intelligence to show you some interesting insights into your spending habits. Monday, for example, will show you how much you spent on the weekend.
"Think of these almost as stories in a sense," Woodward said. "You can scroll through them so you can see your big transactions. You can see how much you spent this week compared to a typical week. You can see how much money you sent to friends and which friends and where you spent the money in November. , for example. "
This also allows you to easily search for a particular transaction using Google's search features. Since this is Google, the search should work quite well and in a demo, the team showed me how the search for "Turkish" led to a transaction in a kebab restaurant, for example, even though it didn't have "Turkish" in his name. If you regularly take photos of your receipts, you can now also search for them from Google Pay and drill down to specific things you've purchased, as well as the receipts and invoices you receive in your Gmail inbox.
Also new within Google Pay is the ability to virtually see and clip coupons which are then linked to your credit card, so you don't have to do anything else besides use that linked credit card to get an extra refund on a certain transaction, for example. If activated, these offers can also be personalized.
The team has also partnered with the Google Lens team to let you scan products and QR codes for potential discounts.
As for the main payment feature, Google is also enabling a new feature that will allow you to use contactless payments at 30,000 gas stations now (often at a discount). Partners for this are Shell, ExxonMobil, Phillips 66, 76 and Conoco.
Plus, you'll soon be able to pay for parking in over 400 cities within the app. Not all cities are Portland, after all, and have a Parking Kitty. The first cities to get this feature are Austin, Boston, Minneapolis, and Washington, DC, with more to follow soon.
It is one thing to let Google handle the transaction with your credit card, it is quite another to give all this information, often highly personal. As the team pointed out during my conversation with them, Google Pay won't sell your data to third parties or even the rest of Google for ad targeting, for example. All custom features are also off by default and the team is doing something new here by letting you activate them for a three month trial period. After these three months, you can decide to keep them on or off.
Ultimately, whether you want to use the optional features and have Google store all of this data is probably a personal choice and not everyone will be comfortable. The rest of Google Pay's core features don't change, after all, so you can still make your NFC payments at the supermarket with your phone just like before.