Nigerians living in the United States would soon be able to send money home using the Google Pay (Gpay) wallet. The only condition is the recipient would need to own a Gpay wallet to receive the funds.
In the meantime, the service is only open for users in the US sending money to the wallet users in India and Singapore, the company said in May. It is the first time the tech company is making an entry into the global remittance market. Google’s ambitions for the market are in character with its size – very big.
Google is partnering with Western Union and Wise to provide crossborder peer-to-peer (P2P) payments. Western Union would give Google Pay access to 200 countries – Nigeria is on the list of Western Union countries, whereas Wise would extend the support to users in over 80 countries.
The two partners are already integrated with Google Pay and plan to roll out the service as soon as possible to users in India and Singapore.
Read Also: Tesla suspends bitcoin payments on environmental impact
Google is looking to take market share in the global remittance market by providing a wallet and payment system that makes remittance easier and simpler.
Global remittance payment volume dropped 8.7 percent last year to $627 million, down from $686 million in 2019, according to an Insider Intelligence research report. The payments are expected to partially rebound this year to $661 stated.
In Nigeria, one of the largest recipients of remittances in the world, the volume of transactions has been down recently. In May, the World Bank reported billion, the report that diaspora remittances to Sub-saharan Africa declined by an estimated 12.5 percent in 2020 to $42 billion, almost entirely due to a 27.7 percent decline to Nigeria, which accounts for over 40 per cent of such flows to the region.
Apparently reflecting the severe impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the incomes of Nigerians living abroad, diaspora remittances inflow into the country fell by over 27 percent, year-on-year, (YOY) to $17.2 billion in 2020 from $23.55 billion in 2019.
Google has been making serious moves into payments. Google Pay currently is the second market leader in Unified Payments Interface or UPI.
Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is a system that powers multiple bank accounts into a single mobile application (of any participating bank), merging several banking features, seamless fund routing & merchant payments into one hood.
In April 2021, Google Pay’s market share during the period recorded a marginal decline from 35 percent to 34.3 percent, data from the National Payments Corporation of India shows.
Last year, Google partnered with 11 banks including Citibank, BBVA USA and BMO Harris to launch Google Plex accounts. Google’s app serves as the front-end to the accounts which are actually hosted by the partner banks.
