GPay is Google's app for payments, financial services, rewards, and, is expanding its capabilities, its partnerships, and its ambitions. Join Glenbrook's George Peabody and Yvette Bohanan as they talk GPay with Steve Klebe, Google's head of GPay business development and Google's Processor and Partnerships work.

Fairly recently, Google's payments services were a disjointed collection of point solutions. Today's GPay is far more than a rebranding job. Listen between the lines to what Steve has to say. The implications are many.

Way More Than a Wallet

A lot has happened since Steve joined us in July 2019.

GPay has added incentives and loyalty more deeply as well as added expense management with automatic receipt discovery when sent to your Gmail account or via the camera. The incentives can turn into real money.

In the U.S. Google has teed up its Plex bank account offerings in partnership with Citi and Stanford FCU (other FIs to come) for launch in 2021. You can already add bank accounts to GPay through Google's partnership with Plaid.

GPay is becoming a very competent user interface to the banking services offered by the FIs themselves. Google provides the UX and the data that matters. The bank does what it does.

Does this disintermediate the banks or give them a new channel through which they can offer their services? We will decide but personal experience suggests the GPay interface has a lot going for it.

Google has added these new capability and consolidated others under the single GPay roof. Its ambitions now go beyond simply being a repository for payment credentials and loyalty cards with a sprinkling of P2P payments on top.

Exercising Open Banking

One of the major payments and fintech trends for 2021 is open banking, the ability of third parties to access accountholder data.

PSD2 has driven this in Europe and India's Unified Payment Interface (UPI), both pushed by mandate, enables a vigorous open banking ecosystem in that country. Google Pay, formerly Tez, has been a huge success in India. Of course, market pressure is the driver in the U.S.

Google is now exploring the potential for GPay to assume the role of "super app" along the lines of WeChat Pay or Alipay. Yes, that's a big leap but there are hints of its ambitions. For example: Google has built over 100 HTML games optimized for low bandwidth networks and low memory smartphones, all targeted toward supporting its NBU (Next Billion Users) effort. GPay will be one of the presentation surfaces for these GameSnack.

Fairly recently, Google's payments services were a disjointed collection of point solutions. Today's GPay is far more than a rebranding job. Listen between the lines to what Steve has to say. The implications are many.

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