Google Pay Launches Digital Credit Card in India

Google Pay launched a digital credit card designed for everyday transactional use in India.

The new Flex by Google Pay is built on India’s RuPay payment network, powered by the country’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) instant payment system, and available only on the Google Pay app, Google said in a Wednesday (Dec. 17) blog post.

The card is co-branded, with the first partner being Axis Bank, and more issuer partners are expected to be added soon, according to the post. Axis Bank introduced the Google Pay Flex Axis Bank Credit Card.

Potential cardholders can apply for Flex within the Google Pay app, with no physical paperwork required, per the post.

The card lives entirely on the user’s phone, can be scanned to pay at millions of offline merchants as well as apps, earns rewards that can be redeemed instantly, and offers the choice to pay in full or convert a credit card bill to Equated Monthly Installments (EMI), the post said.

For security, the Google Pay app enables users to set transaction limits, block or unblock the card, and reset their PIN instantly, according to the post.

Google Pay started to roll out Flex on Wednesday, and the card will be offered to all users within months, per the post.

“Credit cards can be a powerful tool for financial flexibility,” Google Pay said in the post. “But even today, transactional credit in India remains underpenetrated, with only about 50 million credit card holders in the country. We see a unique opportunity to reimagine this experience for the next generation of card users.”

India’s population was estimated in 2024 to be 1.4 billion, according to the Central Intelligence Agency’s World Factbook.

PYMNTS Intelligence found in 2023 that India’s consumers used digital wallets to pay for 55% of retail purchases.

The country began its demonetization of cash in 2016, and many of its citizens quickly became accustomed to using their mobile phones to pay bills, bank, and pay merchants online and in-store using one of the many digital wallets available to them, according to the PYMNTS Intelligence report “2023 Global Digital Shopping Index: India Edition.”

The report also found that the most important digital shopping feature for consumers in India is payment method availability.

Google announced in May 2024 that it had made its digital wallet, Google Wallet, available to users in India.