The Wall street Journal reports about Google’s biggest plan to provide banking and financial services starting early next year. Specifically, it will offer checking accounts for its customer.
Google name the upcoming projects “CACHED”. It will be partnering with banks (Citibank) and small credit union at Stanford to offer the checking accounts and the City bank to handle all financial activities that has relevance to the accounts.
Caesar Sengupta, general manager and vice president of payments at Google spoke to WSJ the initiative and made clarification to profoundly collaborate with banks and financial system.
“Our approach is going to be a partner deeply with banks and the financial system”.
Caesar Sengupta
It will be seeking to put financial partners focusing and concerning the needs of the customer unlike other tech companies.
“If we can help more people do more stuff in a digital way online, it’s good for the internet and good for us”, he added.
He also noted that loyalty card programs can be one of the offers of the said service. It is also considering to whether ask or not charge service fees. The checking accounts bear enormous amount of valuable data about the consumer spending and how much they are earning. However, Google clarifies that selling to advertiser the checking account of financial data is never be possible. It doesn’t also use Google Pay data for advertising purposes.
Google’s plan is anchored to the desire of reaching the needs for its average user. Google has render couple of years to put into reality their so called Google Pay Services. This search giant reach its popularity with over 67 million users a month to countries like India. It became helpful to people to pay every purchase they will have and send money to friend through online all over the world. However, Big Tech companies like Facebook is also offering a pay option in its all platforms named Facebook Pay and soon to build their own digital currency called “Libra “with its partners in banking services. Early this year, Apple Incorporation paired with Goldman Sachs, launch their Apple Card. Even Amazon expectedly describe to offer teenager checking accounts. These tech companies eagerly interested in putting up financial services.
This push Google to enter this kind of aspect in life. This initiative appears to be looking out millennial and more digital savvy customers who are more comfortable in making their lives easier through online tools. Furthermore, they will also benefit from Google’s competence in working with large sets of data and turning it into Value-Added products.
Google comes in the long run and already established its popularity. But still, convincing people to tune in this Google’s latest plan is quite challenging on their part especially because of political and social competition among big tech companies. Thus, there are also who wonder how these big tech companies use their vast digital heft in other areas like business and economic infrastructure.
this is just one of the google projects that never came true!
hmmm i wonder what they are doing with financial industry.