Nium Begins Offering Google Pay Options For Its Visa Cards

Nium, the global FinTech platform, announced in a press release emailed to PYMNTS that users will be able to make payments through Google Pay with its company Visa cards.

In addition, Nium subsidiary InstaReM is also partnering with SBM Bank India to help boost remittances out of the country.

Nium’s Google Pay announcement, according to the release, will help it become more accessible across the world. Nium’s service provides end-to-end processing, issuing and other services for companies. The Google Pay partnership lets those cards work through many more payment terminals and options.

To access the feature, the Nium card will have to be added to the Google account, and then the user can select it as an option at checkout, the release stated. According to Gitesh Athavale, head of Product (Cards) with Nium, the company wanted to help move the payments world into the new digital space.

“We understand that more consumers are moving away from cash and into other forms of payment methods, and this behavior translates to corporate expenses as well,” Athavale said, according to the release. “It just makes sense for us to increase acceptance points within our system in order to provide a greater payment experience for the end users. The integration of Google Pay within our card issuance network allows us to increase the acceptance points for our end users, allowing them to make payments and also track their expenses more easily and directly using their Android devices.”

Meanwhile, InstaReM will now be partnering with SBM Bank India to provide new remittance corridors, quicker transactions and better delivery timings for transfers, according to a separate press release emailed to PYMNTS.

India has long been known as the top receiver of remittances, but the revision of the Liberalised Remittance Scheme (LRS) in 2015 now has many more being sent abroad from the country, the release stated. From 2018 to 2019, the amount of funds being sent out sat at $14 billion, a huge increase from the $1 billion from just a few years earlier in 2015.

Neeraj Sinha, head of Retail and Consumer Banking with SBM Bank India, said the partnership would provide “better efficiency, transparency, affordability and baked-in security. We seek to expand this partnership well beyond one product going forward,” according to the release.

InstaReM also recently offered a new solution to help small businesses get access to loans easier. The service, called BizPay, lets businesses use their corporate cards as a funding source for supplier payments.