Google has relaunched the Google Pay app. The new app, allows consumers and businesses to send and receive money. In the case of individuals, they can send money to anyone on their phone contact list, and businesses can accept payments with just their name or a QR code. Most importantly, the new version of Google Pay allows us to do all this without having to purchase any additional hardware and doesn’t depend on payments being made through via a card terminal. As Daniel Döderlein writes at Forbes: “The difference from the old Google Pay is massive, not only in features and focus, but in the effects it will have on the market.”
He illustrates the difference the new Google Pay will make when compared with, say, a system like Apple Pay. He says, “If Company A serves consumers with a payment tool, such as an app on a device that can hold a card they serve the consumer side.” This is because the merchants need to have hardware to accept a payment. This model limits Company A to using existing networks such as Visa and Mastercard. The old Google Pay used this NFC wallet model, which is called ‘one-sided’.
Google has now shifted its focus away from NFC wallets and made a decision to go ‘two-sided’. This flies in the face of the received wisdom coming from the major card issuers. “The card industry, with Visa and MasterCard at the helm, has spent billions on telling the world that NFC is the best thing since sliced bread and that contactless payments will rule the world,” Döderlein writes, adding that while tapping your card on a card terminal might seem amazing, it’s hardly “mind blowing.” Consumer expectations are rising, and the physical store-bound hardware-based payment scenario is becoming outdated. Döderlein argues, “you can’t ignore the fact that people browse, explore, interact with and shop on their phone, often miles away from the merchant.”
People want payment methods to be even easier and more streamlined. They may want to buy and pay for something on their phone, and then collect it at the store. Removing the card payment hardware from the equation makes that possible.
This is what Google is aware of, although it is by no means the first. “AliPay, Venmo, Zelle, Swish, Mobilepay and a handful of others around the world have already reached more than 1.5 billion users based on this model,” Döderlein reminds us. He added, “The new Google Pay is a bank killer and it also brings a huge stab to the card networks on its path.”
The new Google Pay is a two-sided, proprietary mobile payment network that will address its clients directly, both consumers and merchants, rather than through a partnership with a bank, for example. This could make a big dent in the existing card payment network businesses, because payments will be pulled from a person’s account without the card networks being involved.
It will certainly affect the banks, traditional and challenger. Having a bank account was the main way to obtain a debit or credit card, now Google Pay makes it unnecessary to carry that card around with you.
The model has already been proved to work in China with AliPay and in the Nordic countries it has made payment networks bigger than that of cards.
Google clearly knows it will have a fight on its hands with the card networks, but its willingness to go forward with it, indicates that it is looking to the long term. And as Döderlein says, “it means business.”
There will be a number of losers in the banking world, but the winners are merchants and consumers. Real mobile payments are on their way and that’s a winner for all of us.