PayPal’s chief product architect, Arnold Goldberg, will take over the helm of Google Pay, succeeding Google Pay chief Caesar Sengupta, who left in April last year. Google hopes that Goldberg, who takes over, can turn around the decline of Google’s payment business in one fell swoop. Last year, Google Pay didn’t go well. In March 2021, Google Pay launched a new app in the U.S. market, replacing the Google Pay app that users have been using for years.
Originally developed for the Indian market, the new app is very different from Google Pay used by users in the US. The new app will use mobile phone numbers instead of Google accounts to identify users, which means the new Google Pay no longer supports a host of features that U.S. users have become accustomed to. Apps such as WhatsApp have made Indian consumers accustomed to the way mobile numbers are authenticated.
Because smartphones are the only smart device for many Indian consumers, restrictions like this are not a big problem for Indian users. However, for Google Pay US users, relying on a mobile phone number for authentication means that the Google Pay website feature will disappear, the multi-device feature will no longer exist, and Google Pay will go from supporting multiple accounts to only supporting a single account. The new app became a disaster for American users and Google.
A month after the new Google Pay app was released in the U.S. market, Sengupta left Google, leaving U.S. users with an app with mostly degraded features. A report last August showed that Sengupta’s departure sparked a massive exodus from Google’s payments division, with dozens of employees and executives leaving, including seven supervisors or vice presidents on the team, and half of the business development team members.
By October, Google’s payments division was in a quandary. There are reports that Google’s plans to launch consumer bank accounts have been aborted. Google had previously promoted the service in several blog posts, with 400,000 users waiting to sign up. The departure of Sengupta is the culmination of employee frustration. The product isn’t growing at the rate we expected, said a former Google payments employee.
Data about NFC payment, one of Google Pay’s main functions, can lead to the conclusion that Google’s payment business is not growing fast enough. The Pulse division of credit card company Discover believes that Google has a 3 percent share of the U.S. NFC payments market, while Apple dominates with a 92 percent market share.
But Google was the first big tech company to dabble in NFC payments, launching the Galaxy Nexus in 2011 and Apple three years later with Apple Pay. Due to mismanagement, repeated business restarts or rebranding, Google is now far behind Apple. Google just scrapped its consumer bank account program, and Bill Ready, Google’s president of commerce, said, “We’re not a bank, and we don’t plan to be a bank.
He added, As part of the reform, Google will be more focused To become a ‘comprehensive digital wallet’ covering digital air tickets, air ticket passes and proof of vaccinations.” Reddy revealed a few new features, after all, digital air tickets and proof of vaccinations are already existing features of Google Pay.
One of the new things that Google mentioned is support for cryptocurrencies. Reddy said: We are very focused on cryptocurrencies. As user demand and merchant demand continue to grow, we will also follow the trend. Currently, Google Pay has cooperation with Coinbase and BitPay but does not support cryptocurrency transactions.