Google Pay Now Installed More Than 100 Million Times

Google’s redesign of Google Pay, its digital payment service, appears to be paying off — the company passed the 100 million mark in terms of installs.

According to 9to5Google, while an increasing number of retailers are starting to accept digital payments, it hasn’t taken off in a huge way in the U.S. But with the more than 100 million Google Pay installs, that may start to change. 9to5Google recently polled readers and found a majority use a smartphone for mobile payments.

The install base milestone comes just a few weeks after Google announced it was launching a new mobile app for viewing and managing payments across platforms, cards and other payment methods, in addition to plans for making the Google Pay capability accessible to all — no matter what device they’re using, no matter where they’re shopping and no matter whether they’ve established an account on a Google property before. The goal? To enable easy, secure payments for anyone, anywhere in the digital or physical world, all using a single account — the holy grail of modern payments.

In a recent interview with Karen Webster, Google’s VP of Project Management for Payments Pali Bhat said the secret sauce of Google Pay is the ability to convert the hundreds of millions of consumer accounts with registered card credentials on any one of Google’s touchpoints into Google Pay accounts. That means consumers with accounts and credentials on file with Google Play, Assistant, YouTube and — the potential motherlode of payments credentials — Chrome are all essentially teed up to become Google Pay accounts.  There’s no navigating to Google platforms, no need to even download the Google Pay app to become a Google Pay user. All users must do, said Bhat, is say “yes.” “We have a billion users on Chrome,” Bhat said. “We want every one of those users to be able to pay. Users are already checking out [with merchants] on Chrome, so it will be easy to save their credentials there.”