Having built up a strong base in India, Google Pay is now going aggressive and is gearing up to add facilities like payments using credit and debit cards apart from the bank accounts linked to the app. The cards will have to be saved on the app as the bank accounts. Some of the ambitious plans to expand the scope and feature of the payment app were announced by the company at the I/O conference held this week at San Francisco. It will be a multiple front expansion; both wider acceptability and more payment options.

In one stroke, the Google Pay app can act as a universal payment channel as Google is about to modify the API to accept payments through UPI on its app internationally. In countries like the US and Germany, Google Pay has integrated PayPal into the app. The end result of all this is that Google Pay could emerge as a dynamic payment option for customers. International customers can pay Indian merchants and merchants outside India can accept payments from Indians through Google Pay. A single software development kit (SDK) developed by Google will be released to merchants across the globe. It will be a win-win situation for the merchants and the users of the app at once.

PhonePe, the other serious player owned by Flipkart (Walmart), does have a facility of sorts to accept payments through multiple sources, including cards.

Just to give you an idea of how much Google Pay has grown in India, it has 45 million monthly active users and an annual run rate of $81 billion. These figures may not sound so formidable in the light of the size of the Indian market and the endless possibilities it provides. However, the rate of adoption of the payment app is definitely quite high and with these additional features, these numbers will only move northward.