Sundar Pichai Is Thrilled By Google Pay's India Success, Will Replicate Model In Other Nations

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai is over the moon with Google Pay’s success story in India.

He spoke about the digital payments product during a post-earning call on February 3, where he underscored the importance of Google Pay in India.

“We had a tremendously successful launch in India from which we learned a lot of features, and we are bringing that and we are revamping our payments products globally,” Pichai said.

Google Pay was launched in the Indian market in 2017, utilizing the UPI or Unified Payments Interface platform created by the government’s National Payments Corporation Of India or NPCI — an online platform that aimed to simplify money transfer and online payments.

And with the growth of UPI users in India, so has Google Pay usage shot up over the past three years, according to reports.

According to latest available figures from December 2019, UPI payments grew 7.37% month-on-month (MoM) totalling to 1.31 billion transactions. Google Pay claims to have 67 million users as of September 2019, with significant growth in transaction volume through their product.

UPI and Google Pay’s growth has been so amazing in India, that In his letter to Ann Misback, secretary, board of governors of the US Federal Reserve System, a high-ranking Google executive wrote the following about UPI platform, “The approach in India attained amazing results for banks, consumers, other players within the payment ecosystem and India’s central bank. Adoption of the system was rapid, growing from 100,000 monthly transactions, to 77 million, to 480 million, to 1.15 billion monthly transactions in the first four years.”

Obviously, while Sundar Pichai‘s hoping to replicate Google Pay’s India success in other markets, the product will continue to add new features in the coming months — support for bank credit cards and debit cards in India, something that the service already has in US and other markets.