Two years after debuting in India, Google’s digital payment platform, Google Pay, has outpaced PhonePe to hit 67 million monthly active users (MAUs) in the country. The Flipkart-backed app is one of the biggest payments platforms in India with 55 million reported MAUs in June. Speaking at the fifth edition of the ‘Google for India’ event on Thursday, Ambarish Kenghe, the director or product management at Google Pay, claimed UPI transactions on the platform grew from 17 million in August 2017 to 918 million in August 2019.
He further said that the number of users grew three times in the past 12 months alone. “In the last 12 months alone, Google Pay has grown 3X to reach to 67 million monthly active users, driving transactions worth over $110 billion on an annualized basis, with hundreds of thousands of offline and online merchants”, he said. “The biggest story in India’s booming Internet economy has been the rise of digital payments. With BHIM UPI crossing 900 million payments last month, India is setting the global standard on how to digitize payments”, he added.
According to a new report by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), retail electronic payment transactions in the country grew by more than 50 percent CAGR in volume over the past four years, with the growth in 2018-19 largely attributed to the steep increase in the number of UPI payments.
However, with Google Pay usage largely restricted to end-consumers thus far, Google launched a new app called Google Pay for Business that the company says will expand the adoption of digital payments by merchants. According to Kenghe, the app will offer “a free and easy way for small and medium-sized merchants to enable digital payments without the hassle of time-consuming on-boarding and verification process”.
You can read more details about Google Pay for Business by going through our detailed article on the subject.
With inputs from IANS
