Android Pay and Google Wallet will soon be combined into a single Google Pay service.
Alphabet Inc. has announced that its mobile wallet app offerings will soon be streamlined into a single service. It will be bringing its Android Pay and Google Wallet into a single brand, which it will call Google Pay.
The goal is to make it easier for users to make mobile payments using information saved into their Google Account.
“With Google Pay, it’ll be easier for you to use the payment information saved to your Google Account, so you can speed through checkout with peace of mind,” said the company’s vice president of product management for payments, Pali Bhat in a recent blog post.
Google is updating its mobile payments strategy as it faces fierce competition from Apple Pay, PayPal, and a growing number of large players.
Jordan McKee, 451 Research analyst, explained that Alphabet’s many mobile payment brands were starting to become confusing for users.
By using Google Pay as a single mobile wallet app for the brand, it reduces that confusion and other challenges.
“The lack of unity and consistent messaging has created challenges for consumers in understanding which Google payment product to use, not to mention how, where and why to use it,” said McKee. He added that by launching Google Pay, it is a way of amending the confusion by unifying all its various products into a single branded suite.
A recent survey by Landor’s branding Unit at WPP Ltd scored Google Wallet rather poorly. The results of that survey were released in November and showed that only about 13 percent of consumers felt that Google Wallet was a trustworthy mobile payments service. There were 17,000 American customers who made up the participants in that survey.
In the same research, Apple Pay’s score was about the same, but PayPal was far ahead of them, despite the fact that its trustworthiness was approved of by only 30 percent of participants. Comparatively though, MasterCard and Visa were rated trustworthy by 17 percent and 23 percent of customers, so it’s clear that PayPal is by far the industry leader.
It will be interesting to see whether or not the Google Pay mobile wallet app cleans up the service’s reputation and boost its user ship.
