Google Pay expands 'Nearby Stores' feature to 35 cities in India: Know more

Nearby Stores spot on Google Pay helps users see which stores, providing essential goods, are open in their vicinity.

Google Pay on Wednesday announced that it's 'Nearby Stores’ spot, which provides information such as business hours, essential items stock, social distancing information, is now available in 35 cities across the country.

“Originally rolled in a few cities across India, this Spot is now available in 35 cities across the country. Additionally, merchant establishments can now indicate their business hours, whether social distancing measures are in place at the store and the essential goods presently in stock. Additionally, users in Mumbai can also see if the store is present in a containment zone,” said Google in a statement.

Here is a list of cities that get Google Pay’s Nearby Stores spot:

Telangana: Hyderabad, Ranga Reddy, Secunderabad

Karnataka: Bengaluru, Mysuru

Maharashtra: Mumbai, Nagpur, Navi Mumbai, Pimpri-Chinchwad

Delhi NCR: New Delhi

Haryana: Gurugram, Faridabad

Tamil Nadu: Chennai

Gujarat: Surat, Ahmedabad

Bihar: Patna

Uttar Pradesh: Varanasi, Lucknow, Ghaziabad, Prayag Raj, Kanpur, Noida, Greater Noida

Andhra Pradesh: Visakhapatnam

Madhya Pradesh: Indore

West Bengal: Kolkata

Orissa: Bhubaneswar

Punjab: Ludhiana, Sahibzada Ajit Singh Nagar,

Chandigarh

Kerala: Thiruvananthapuram, Kochi, Ernakulam

Besides expanding the Nearby Stores spot to more cities, Google Pay now also takes booking for cooking gas cylinders from HP Gas, Bharat Petroleum and Indane.

PhonePe annual loss more than doubles to Rs 1,905 crore in 2018-19

According to previous RoC filings, the net loss in 2017-18 was Rs 791 crore, way higher than the Rs 129 crore in FY17.

PhonePe, the Walmart-owned digital payment platform, more than doubled its losses in 2018-19 to Rs 1,905 crore compared to a year before, according to a registrar of companies (RoC) filing.

The firm, facing stiff competition from financial technology giant Paytm, as well as Google Play, has been working hard on gaining market share. Revenue in FY19 rose fivefold, to Rs 245.8 crore. According to previous RoC filings, the net loss in 2017-18 was Rs 791 crore, way higher than the Rs 129 crore in FY17.

Employee benefit expense in FY19 had risen 308 per cent to Rs 531 crore from a year before.

Google Pay posted a net profit of Rs 5.1 crore in FY19, with revenue of Rs 1,119 crore, an increase of 2.5 times as compared to the Rs 438.3 crore in FY18. PhonePe has been on an expansion drive. It has been trying to increase its footprint offline to take on Paytm and Google Pay, which has made major inroads into tier-III/tier-IV cities and smaller towns.

The company last month announced that its app drove 380 million transactions in August, with 90 million offline transactions. It claims to be accepted as a payment option across 6.5 million offline stores in 210 cities. According to several reports, the company is independently trying to raise close to a billion dollars for a next stage of expansion. It claims to have at least 150 million users.

While PhonePe operates its payments system through semi-closed prepaid instrument services and Unified Payment Interface (UPI), it says it is ‘also actively exploring other business avenues in the payments and e-commerce space’. PhonePe banks on its offline merchants to make payments through not only UPI but also credit cards, debit cards and external wallets.

Payment apps like PhonePe, Google Pay, and Paytm are in an increasingly competitive market. While some incumbents took time to switch to the government-endorsed UPI, PhonePe, and Google Pay built their systems around the platform. Recently, UPI claimed to have completed a billion transactions since its launch three years ago.

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Mastercard says it will meet Dec-end target for data localisation in India

However, says the card payments major, restricting data flows in digital transactions will affect the quality of fraud detection and assessment.

Mastercard is confident of completing its data localisation requirements in India by the end of this year. However, says the card payments major, restricting data flows in digital transactions will affect the quality of fraud detection and assessment.

“We are totally committed. In fact, we are in full execution mode...And, we remain completely committed to the end of the year (deadline) that we have given to the Reserve Bank of India. So, I don't see a challenge on the question of data localisation," said Ari Sarker, its Asia-Pacific co-president.

However, he adds, this restricting of cross-border data flow and storing data only in India will impact fraud detection and management.

As an example, says Mastercard, it stores only aggregate and anonymised data, such as the amount spent on a transaction, the account number and so on. If an Indian travels abroad the card gets compromised there, and the fraudster uses these credentials to withdraw money from different ATMs in different country locations, it will be difficult for the person to know on a real-time basis that such fraud is happening.

Similarly, if a fraud trend is detected in different countries and Indian transaction data is disconnected from world data, fraud detection engines here will end up getting built only on local trends.

"Our data scientists tell us that for the sake of accuracy of the trend, you need 13 months of data — then, you can really see how behaviour patterns actually shift. That's the historical perspective you need to create...our view on that (data localisation) is it's actually not in India's interest," Sarker said.

New ID check

Mastercard will go live on Google Pay, the information technology giant's payments app, launched first in India as Google Tez in 2017. "We're going to be live with Google in the first quarter (of the next financial year). The essence is tokenised credentials or pass-through credentials working through Google Pay. The reason we're going first quarter is also because we're also delivering our ID Check capability together with it. It will be a better product capability once we launch through Google Pay," Sarker said.

Last month, Google Pay launched a feature called tokenised cards. This will let users add debit and credit cards to the Google Pay application, which has so far worked only on the Unified Payments Platform in India.

Business Standard

Google Pay widens digital features, products: Here're key announcements

It launched a 'Google Pay for Business', a separate app for merchants and businesses to enable digital payments through remote verification and registration, that can be done "in minutes".

Digital payments are top on Google India's priority list, if one goes by the announcements here on Thursday at its annual event.

At the 'Google for India' fixture, Google Pay, the technology giant's payments platform, launched a host of features and products aimed at getting more businesses and people on the platform.

It launched a 'Google Pay for Business', a separate app for merchants and businesses to enable digital payments through remote verification and registration, that can be done “in minutes”.

A demonstration featured a video-based know-your-customer process through Google Duo, its video calling app.

With a voice-based assistant taking a shopkeeper through the registration process.

Ambarish Kenghe, director of product management at Google Pay, said Pay for Business was "a free and easy way for small and medium-sized merchants to enable digital payments without the hassle of time-consuming on-boarding and verification processes.

We hope these initiatives will help merchants adopt digital payments with more confidence."

The app was tested by merchant establishments over months in Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Gurugram, said Caesar Sengupta, vice-president of their Next Billion Users Initiative and Payments. The latter is a categorisation of people coming online for the first time.

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Google Pay sharing payments data with group firms, third parties: Paytm

This is not the first time Paytm has called out an international firm over data and payments issues.

Vijay Shekhar Sharma-owned fintech major Paytm has alleged that payments platform Google Pay is violating guidelines by sharing data with its group companies and third parties, and also using it for advertising purposes.

Google Pay’s privacy policy states it collects, stores, uses, and discloses users’ personal data for advertising and promotional purposes, Paytm claims in its letter to National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI).

“We would like to highlight a very important fact that Google Pay, which is an un-regulated payments platform, has the scope of using their customers’ data for their monetary gains with complete disregard of the user’s need for privacy. The critical payments data collected by them is being processed and stored outside of India, which can have severe security implications in case of a data breach as their policy states that this data is also being disclosed with advertisers and third-parties,” reads the company’s letter.

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One97 Communications, the company that owns Paytm, said on several occasions it stored as well as processes user data onshore. “India is in the process of drafting its personal data protection bill. Against this backdrop, it is of utmost concern that global companies are sharing Indian users’ personal data among group companies,” the company wrote in the email.

In a statement, Google refuted the charges, saying its payments users have a direct relationship with the firm. According to Google Pay terms of service, a Google account is opened with Google LLC. “A common Google Account allows for checks and controls required for managing risk, fraud, spam, and for enhancing security measures that are applied across Google products... Google does not use any individual UPI transactions data for any monetisation purpose,” its spokesperson said.

It added that Google Pay shares user data as may be required for the purpose of processing transactions or providing Google Pay Services with our authorised partners.

Article Source Business Standard