US-based search engine giant Google on Thursday said it is committed to supporting the Indian government's move to digitise payments and data localisation.
In an interview to CNBC-TV18, Caesar Sengupta, general manager, payments, and vice-president, Next Billion Users, said, "Google Pay was launched on September 18 2017. In August 2018, it had 17 million transactions, August 2019 had 918 million transactions, so 54x increase on BHIM UPI in two years. Now, the spend on BHIM UPI overall has exceeded debit card spend in India and that is staggering. Google Pay has surpassed all of our expectations."
"In the beginning, we were responding to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's call for a Digital India and to help digitise payments in India. We would have been very happy to have played a small role in it but Google Pay today is being used everywhere. Two-thirds of our usage actually comes from tier II and tier III cities," Sengupta said.
"Google Pay today has 67 million monthly users and is growing very rapidly. Every time we have added a new experience on Google Pay, whether it was top-ups, bill payments, gold buying, gold gifting, users have loved it. So, we found users wanting more experiences, wanting to use digital payments on more experiences. Any merchant, any business can create a spot. All they need is HTML Javascript, which is super easy as most of the developers in India knows the language. Further, you add a few APIs and you have got a spot that people can discover on Google Pay. However, most interestingly, people can discover offline and through any messaging app."
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