Now, Google is moving towards the massive remittances market. However, the tech giant’s mobile payment services Google Pay announced on Tuesday that the users of the U.S. are now permitted to send money to India and Singapore.
Well, the company has teamed up with the money transfer firms Wise and Western Union on the features, including their platform in the Google Pay App. However, the user will get the opportunity to choose between the Wise or Western Union for moving their money abroad. Currently, Google will be taking a small cut of the cross-broader transactions that are created through the app.
Now, Google Pay has launched a new version of its app in the U.S. last year that is marking a push into the banking services with the addition of checking accounts from the lenders like Citi.
Google is one of the largest tech firms which is pushing deeper into the financial world. Apple has launched its own credit card in partnership with Goldman Sachs in 2019. Facebook is now making a number of moves in the field of digital currency and payments. Meanwhile, over in China, Alibaba affiliate Ant Financial and Tencent have now turned intimidating players in the digital payments space.
Till now, these Big Tech companies have no ostensible determinations to become banks.
“We’re not planning to become a bank or a remittance provider,” said Josh Woodward, Google Pay’s director of product management. He also said, “We work with the ecosystem that already exists to build these products.”
Google’s latest financial services thrust will see it enter the enormous remittances market. The World Bank forecasts that remittances into low and middle-income countries were valued at $508 billion in 2020. That’s truly down 7% from 2019, a decline the bank ascribed to the Covid-19 pandemic’s impression on migration.
The news is a big victory for Wise. The London-based fintech firm, before known as TransferWise, is progressively marketing its platform as a service to banks like France’s Groupe BPCE, Britain’s Monzo, and Germany’s N26. Meanwhile, Western Union has been upping its digital strategy lately to ward off upstarts like Wise and WorldRemit.
Going forward, Google wants to enlarge its remittances feature into the 80 countries Wise functions in and, eventually, the 200 nations Western Union covers.
