Recently, your correspondent wrote about the popularity of Alipay, China’s mobile payment application of choice. Mobile payment is still struggling to appeal to Western consumers but no one in Silicon Valley has any doubt about its growth potential. Google, anxious not to let rivals Apple and Samsung carve the lion's share of the market, has decided to restructure its sector offering.
Until now, users have had access to Google Wallet (launched in 2011) and Android Pay (2015). Google has combined these services and rebranded them as Google Pay. It will still take several months, however, for Wallet, renamed Google Pay Send, to transfer money from peer to peer directly through the Google Pay app.
The United States and the United Kingdom will be the first markets concerned. In Switzerland, the Twint service is the market leader, ahead of Apple Pay and Samsung Pay, but Google is yet to launch its services here.
Visa and Allianz have also recently combined forces to throw their hat in the ring of mobile payment with the application “Allianz Prime”
Google has big plans. It wants to facilitate all payments, both in the digital world and in the physical world, from a single account, which the specialised site Pymnts.com calls "the holy grail of modern payments." Eventually, Google Pay will be accessible from all products in the group (Chrome, Assistant, Google Play and YouTube). The app will also allows users to pay for public transport in London, Kiev and Portland, and is in the process of adding new new cities.
Samsung in direct competition
Apple and Google are not necessarily rivals in the same market. Mobile payment does not count enough today in the choice of smartphone brand by the consumer. Samsung Pay, by contrast, is a major competitor for Google since both use the Android operating system.
Google, Samsung and Apple are far behind the Chinese market, which is far more open to alternative payments. WeChatPay and AliPay have hundreds of millions of users in China. The research firm eMarketer predicts that nearly 80 percent of Chinese smartphone users will pay via a mobile payment application by 2021 as opposed to an expected 23 percent in the United States and 15 percent in Germany.
Sources: TheCrunch.com; Le temps
Photo: Pixabay
