“In the last 12 months alone, we’ve grown more than three times to 67 million monthly active users, driving transactions worth over US$110bn on an annualised basis, with hundreds of thousands of offline and online merchants,” Caesar Sengupta, vice president of Google’s next billion users initiative, has revealed.

Sengupta announced the numbers alongside the launch of a series of new Google Pay initiatives in India.

These include the launch of a new Spot Platform for merchants that uses NFC tags “to create branded commercial experiences that bridge the offline and online worlds”, the addition of support for debit and credit cards and the launch of a new Google Pay for Business app.

“Tokenized cards on Google Pay will be rolling out in the next few weeks with Visa cards for HDFC, Axis, Kotak and Standard Chartered banks,” Sengupta said.

“And we will roll out support to cover Mastercard and Rupay and more banks in the coming months.

“We’re also deepening our support for small businesses through a new app called Google Pay for Business: a free and easy way for small- and medium-sized merchants to enable digital payments without the hassle of [a] time-consuming onboarding and verification process.”

“The biggest story in India’s booming internet economy has been the rise of digital payments,” Sengupta explained.

“BHIM UPI has transformed how India makes payments. From 17 million payments in August 2017, to crossing 900 million payments last month, India is setting the global standard on how to digitise payments.”

“The reality is that despite the massive growth of digital payments, the vast majority of India’s over 60 million small businesses are still not benefiting from the growing digital economy.

“We hope these initiatives will help merchants adopt digital payments with more confidence and help contribute to the long-term growth of online financial services for the benefit of every Indian.”

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