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Source: DeFi Shirasawa Research Institute
Written by | Black rice
According to Bloomberg, Google has hired Arnold Goldberg, a former senior vice president and chief product architect at payments giant PayPal, to lead its payments business, Google Pay.
Google has been exploring digital checking and savings services for Google Pay users, called "Plex," for years, and has partnered with 11 banks to launch the service, but last October the company halted the strategy. Google Pay wants to be the "connector" for the entire consumer finance industry, not just certain partners, and doesn't want to be a bank.
After abandoning its foray into the banking sector, Google set a new direction for Google Pay.
While Google has long dominated search and other online services, it has never shaken the financial world. So far, Google Pay has only gained some attention in India, while development in other regions has struggled. It lags far behind rival Apple Pay, and it doesn't launch its own credit cards and financial products like Apple. Industry analyst Tom Noyes estimates that Google Pay will account for only 4 percent of cashless or contactless payments in the U.S. in 2020, calling the service "a big failure."
But Google does have a huge consumer presence. Launched in 2015 and upgraded in 2020, Google Pay aims to become a hub for consumers to track fees and find discounts, with no fees charged when users use Google Pay transactions. At the time, Google revealed that the app had 150 million monthly active users worldwide.
Bill Ready, Google's president of commerce, said in an interview with Bloomberg: "Our goal is to help make connections, not to create conflict. ”
So, as part of the reform, Google Pay will add more payment features to search engines and shopping services, and to this end, it will work with a wider range of financial services (including crypto assets) to focus on becoming an "integrated digital wallet".
"Encryption is something we're very focused on, and as user needs and merchant needs evolve, we're going to evolve with them," Ready said. ”
Google Pay has actually made some initial progress in the crypto industry.
In March 2020, Google Pay added support for Coinbase Card, which makes it easier for users to consume crypto assets in-store. Coinbase Card is a Visa debit card launched by crypto exchange Coinbase in April 2019. Users with this card can pay with 10 different crypto assets directly from their Coinbase balance at any store that accepts Visa payments, and even receive up to 4% purchase rebates.
In August 2021, Google Pay added support for BitPay Mastercard crypto debit cards. Two months later, the debit card launched by crypto exchange Bakkt in partnership with Visa was also integrated into Google Pay, which can be used for daily consumption of crypto assets.
Nor is Google stepping into the crypto market for the first time.
According to a report released by analyst firm CBInsights in late 2017, from 2012 to 2017, Google Venture (abbreviated as "GV"), Google's venture capital arm, invested in a number of crypto startups, including Gyft, Blockchain, Ripple, Buttercoin, LedgerX, and others. In the five years from 2012 to 2017, Google ranked second in the world in the number of investments in the crypto field, after The Japanese SoftBank Group.
Image: Some of Google's investment events in the crypto industry originated from the Zero One think tank.
While Google Pay still doesn't support crypto trading at the moment, it will continue to expand its partnerships with crypto companies. It's clear that crypto is part of its future growth strategy, and perhaps that's one of the reasons for hiring former PayPal executives.
Arnold Goldberg previously served as Chief Product Architect and General Manager of PayPal, where he led the company's core checkout and merchant services businesses. In 2020, while in office, goldberg added PayPal crypto business after obtaining permission from the U.S. financial services department, and its users will be able to trade and hold crypto assets directly from PayPal accounts, opening the door to crypto payments for its 377 million users worldwide. Since then, PayPal expanded it into its sub-application Venmo, and not its 26 million merchants worldwide have created a "checkout with encryption" feature.
In 2021, the business also expanded to the UK market, providing crypto trading services to UK clients, where they can trade major crypto assets, including BTC, ETH, LTC and BCH.
At the end of the same year, PayPal confirmed that it would launch its own stablecoin, tentatively named "PayPal Coin". Developer Steve Moser first discovered the internal development of the stablecoin in the source code of the iPhone application in PayPal. Jose Fernandez da Ponte, senior vice president of digital currencies at PayPal, confirmed in an interview: "We are exploring a stablecoin; if we seek to move forward, we will of course work closely with the relevant regulators." ”
Although Google's encryption plans are not more revealing, a sentence in the interview is worth recalling: "Helping more activity take place on the free, open web – which naturally brings dividends to our overall business." ”