The global spread of digital payments gets a huge boost from giants like Google. Google’s Google Pay is far more than just a wallet, and the subject of this Payments on Fire® episode with Steve Klebe.

Steve heads Google’s Processor and Partnerships business and has terrific experience in our industry, working with payment gateway CyberSource, payment security firm RSA, and carrier billing firm BilltoMobile. He’s also served multiple times on the board of the Electronic Transaction Association.

In other words, a true payments geek.

Here’s what we talked about:

• The evolution of Google Pay from its 2011 launch as Google Wallet and the various incarnations since then
• Google’s business model for GPay and the degree to which the data generated by GPay transactions influence (or not) the advertisements we see on sites using Google’s advertising services
• Transit payments, Google’s role in the W3C’s Payment Request API, and how Google pulls it into its own tools
• The Google Pay value proposition and how it combines the value of hundreds of millions of cards on file, their organic growth through Chrome’s auto-fill, Google’s own sales, and making those credentials available to third parties via Google Pay
• The new Google Pay APIs that focus more on convenience than payments: event ticketing, airline boarding passes, and more
• Google Pay India, renamed from Tez, and its role in the UPI framework that enables secure bank-to-bank transactions.

We conclude with thoughts on the Open Banking phenomenon and Google’s intentions in that area.