The users of digital wallet platform, Google Pay in US can now send money to GPay users in India and Singapore, Google announced on Tuesday.
Google Pay has partnered with money transfer firms Western Union and Wise on the feature of integrating their platforms into the Google Pay app. It is the first time that either of the cross-border payment companies has signed such a deal.
The tech giant mobile payments service Google Pay launched a new version of its app in the U.S last year, marking a thrust into banking services with checking accounts feature from lenders such as Citi.
“We’re not planning to become a bank or a remittance provider,” Josh Woodward, Google Pay’s director of product management, said in an interview.
“We work with the ecosystem that already exists to build these products. As we do with a number of Google products, we will test, learn, and iterate and then start scaling,” he said.
The World Bank forecasts, India was the largest receiving country for remittances in 2019, receiving more than $80 billion in the year. The U.S being the largest sender, intends to enable fully cross-border remittances across the world. If we have look at the remittances into low and middle-income, the countries were worth $508 billion in 2020.
According to a report by Citi last month, nearly 250 million people across the world send over $500 billion in cross-border remittances annually. Along with google other tech giants like Apple is planning to go deeper into the financial services sector lately.