Google Expands FinTech Ambitions In Japan With pring Acquisition

Google is set to acquire pring, a Tokyo-based cashless payment and settlement startup company, for between $180 million and $270 million, Nikkei Asia reported. The move will give the IT giant a foothold in Japan’s growing financial services space.

Once the deal is completed, Google will offer FinTech services, including payments and transfers, across Japan by next year, mirroring similar offerings in the U.S. and India, according to the report.

Google’s entry into Japan marks an important shift for the country, which has been largely resistant to cashless payments, the report stated. Users of the pring app can make payments, cash transfers and withdrawals on their mobile devices and laptops.

Japan was home to one of the world’s first mobile commerce innovations with the DotCoMo mobile wallet all the way back in 2004, but the country remains a heavily cash-based economy, Darren Abrahamson, managing director of Bain Capital Tech Opportunities told PYMNTS in August.

“It’s just a very different cultural market,” Abrahamson said.

He said Japanese consumers have a well-established preference for managing transactions in cash, but Bain sees that coming to an “inflection point” where things could soon change for three reasons.

First, Japan’s younger generation is becoming a larger part of the consumer economy and demanding a change to digital to match their tech-friendly habits. Second, massive political efforts have started to “bend the curve a little bit on this” by giving consumers rewards and cash rebates backed by the government for making cashless payments.

Abrahamson said the government is also giving merchants incentives to buy contactless terminals. He said some of those efforts stemmed from the Tokyo Olympics, “where they just wanted to have the ability to accept all forms of payments from all the tourists that were expected. And even though that has been shifted out a year, much of the push has been to catch up, frankly, with the rest of the developed world and certainly the other Asian economies in particular.”

The third main driver for Japan’s potential move to electronic payments has been the pandemic and the resulting loss of consumer appetite worldwide for handling cash.