Android Pay has updated their website with about 71 new financial institutions that now support the mobile payment service. The majority of these – as expected at this point – are pretty small institutions and ones that are mostly regional. Including 1st Constitution Bank, FBT Bank, First International Bank of Barry, Triangle Credit Union and many more. You can head to the link at the bottom of this post to see all of the supported financial institutions.
It’s important to remember that with Android Pay, you not only need your card company (Visa, Mastercard, Discover, etc) to be compatible with the service, but also your financial institution – a bank or credit union – to be compatible as well. And since there are so many out there, Google has been working hard to get everyone on board, and are doing quite well with adding swaths of new institutions. Which is good to see, especially for those that are still waiting for their banking institution to add support for Android Pay. So far, the mobile payment service has yet to gain a huge following, but adding more banks is definitely going to help with that. It’s also only available in a handful of countries right now.
Android Pay is Google’s second attempt at a mobile payment service, after launching Google Wallet a few years ahead of Apple Pay and Samsung Pay, which both launched pretty recently and gained a huge following. Given they are the two largest smartphone makers in the world, that’s not too surprising. Android Pay allows you to use your smartphone to make payments, by basically tapping your smartphone onto the terminal at your favorite merchant. So that you are able to pay with your phone and never need to pull out your wallet. Google did also add the functionality in Android Wear 2.0, so now you can also tap your watch, if it has a NFC chip (not all of them do). Which is a bit of an odd thing to do, tapping your wrist on the payment terminal, especially depending on where that NFC chip is. But it’s still a great feature to have available.
Android Pay