Google Pay Is the Mobile Payment King in India
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Here's your Money Briefing. I'm J.R. Whalen at The Wall Street Journal in New York. PayPal and Venmo are popular apps for mobile payments in the U.S., but in India, hundreds of millions of people use Google Pay. In a moment, we'll check in with our reporter in Delhi, who will explain how Google Pay got so popular in India. First, some money in market news you should know. The housing market may be on the road to recovery. Sales of existing homes in August rose at their strongest pace since March of last year. August marked the second straight month of growth for existing home sales, after 16 straight months of year-over-year declines. Economists say mortgage rates hovering near 3.5% are helping to entice buyers to re-enter the housing market.
A lack of confidence in the global economy is one factor driving investors to purchase bonds.
How did Google Pay become the top mobile payments app in India?
As demand rises, prices go up and yields fall. But how low can yields go? A new video from the Wall Street Journal examines how yields have moved into negative territory.
Take a listen. Negative rates give investors an incentive to buy bonds rather than park their money at a bank. This drives up demand. These factors have pushed bond prices higher and driven down yields, so much so that they are now in negative territory, and in some cases, even below the negative rates set by central banks. So why would investors continue to buy bonds with negative yields? Well, if demand continues to rise, buying now means potentially selling bonds later at a higher price.
See the full video at WSJ.com and the WSJ app and find out why rates in negative territory for longer periods of time can be detrimental to retirees.
What role did smartphone affordability and cheap data play in India's digital payments boom?
Just a few years ago, the cost of Internet access made it out of reach for hundreds of millions of India's residents. Well, fast forward to today, and more Indians are online, and they're even conducting business online, to the tune of more than $110 billion in digital payments annually. And they're doing it with Google Pay, a two-year-old app that has, with the help of India, become the most downloaded financial technology app worldwide. Wall Street Journal reporter Nuli Pernell joins us from Delhi to explain how mobile payments have become so popular in India. So newly, inexpensive smartphones and data plans have given India's population of 1.3 billion people access to the mobile payment arena.
Many of them have bypassed credit card use altogether, and they've gone straight to digital payments.
That's right. So there's really been a revolution here in India over the last few years. It all started about three years ago when the Indian government, in a bid to crack down on corruption, canceled the highest denomination bills. So suddenly they replaced them with new bills and there was a cash crunch and people had to line up at these long lines for ATMs to get cash.
How did India's demonetization accelerate mobile wallet adoption?
And they started using mobile wallets and started becoming comfortable with that technology. And then Google Pay with its app came along. a couple years ago, and it's really grown by leaps and bounds. But yeah, it's all built on inexpensive data, which has been another big change here, and then it's falling prices of smartphones. So suddenly smartphones are nearly ubiquitous here, and so people are using them now to spend money.
So was Google Pay the first mobile app to be available in India?
No, there have been others over the years. In fact, one of the longest-running ones is called Paytm, backed by Alibaba and SoftBank. It's quite popular. They offer a mobile wallet and some other services. But Google Pay is built along with a new wave of some of these other similar apps on a government platform that bureaucrats put together that allows people to connect their bank accounts for free. to the platform and transfer money either to other bank accounts or to businesses. And it's proved a very popular and easy to use platform.
How does Google Pay leverage the government-built payments platform (UPI)?
And Google sensed that I think that it could be big and so came in quickly a couple of years ago and they launched with a big advertising campaign.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:05–0:52
2
How did Google Pay become the top mobile payments app in India?
0:52–1:50
3
What role did smartphone affordability and cheap data play in India's digital payments boom?
1:50–3:00
4
How did India's demonetization accelerate mobile wallet adoption?
3:00–4:04
5
How does Google Pay leverage the government-built payments platform (UPI)?
4:04–6:09
6
What everyday uses make Google Pay ubiquitous among Indian merchants and consumers?
6:09–7:14
7
How does India compare to China and the U.S. in mobile payment value and usage?
7:14–9:53
8
What are the commercial opportunities and potential monetization strategies for Google Pay in India?
9:53–11:11
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from WSJ Your Money Briefing
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