Google Pay Testing NFC-Based Card Payments in India

Google Pay is currently one of the most popular UPI-based payments service in India. The app allows you to send money to friends, pay bills, recharge mobile numbers, and more. It also lets you pay at businesses using the Spot platform. Google Pay was also scheduled to get a tokenized card feature, as per an announcement from a year ago, but it’s nowhere to be seen until date. The payment service has, however, started testing NFC-based card payments in India.

First reported by Android Police, Google Pay has added support for debit and credit cards as a supported payment option in the app. The service supports only Axis Bank credit/ debit and SBI credit cards at the moment.

To set up your credit/ debit card, open the Google Pay app and tap on your profile picture at the top right. You then need to head into the ‘Bank Accounts and Cards’ section to find the new ‘Add Card’ option. It will tell you that you can add cards only from two major banks in India. But, we can expect more banks to hop on over the coming months. You will need to verify the same via an OTP message received from the bank.

If you find it hard to figure out, Google Pay already has a couple of support pages live to help you through the setup process. It mentions that adding your credit/ debit card to the app will ‘register your card for Tokenized card payments’ and enable a slew of features in India.

The most important of all is NFC-based card payments, which lets you simply tap your phone at NFC terminals to complete payments. It also enables you to scan Bharat QR payment codes and make payments at online websites where Google Pay is supported.

For those unfamiliar with tokenized cards, it means Google Pay will assign a virtual account number to safeguard your real credit/ debit card number. All of this data is stored on your Android phone, so you need to set up your cards each time you decide to switch to a new device.

The NFC payments option seems to be rolling out to beta users first. I have received the feature in my Google Pay app on OnePlus Nord, but can’t access it due to the lack of an SBI or Axis card. Have you tried out NFC payments via Google Pay? Share your experience with us in the comments below.