Google on Wednesday announced that Android Pay is now officially available in Spain, with the service rolling out in the European country as of today, adding that its mobile payments solution is already supported by more than a million stores. Spain is the sixth country on the Old Continent to receive Android Pay, though the platform will initially only be available to customers of the Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA). That’s still a notable percentage of the population seeing how BBVA is the second largest bank in the country, and the Mountain View, California-based tech giant already promised to continue expanding support for Android Pay to more banks and financial institutions in Spain but didn’t provide a more specific time frame to accompany that announcement, nor did it clarify on the matter in any other way.
Google’s newly established partnership with BBVA may be significant in a more wider context than the one pertaining solely to Spain; the BBVA financial group is present in 35 markets throughout the world and its 133,000 employees presently serve over 70 million customers on the planet. The organization has an extremely large presence in Mexico, Argentina, Turkey, and a number of European countries, and the fact that Google now has direct access to the financial giant may bode well for the company’s future ambitions pertaining to the expansion Android Pay. In the short term, the collaboration will allow BBVA’s customers in Spain to use Google’s mobile payments solution to pay in a wide variety of different store chains and online services, from Starbucks, Zara, Deliveroo, and Uterqüe to VIPS, Media Markt, Hotel Tonight, Vueling, and El Corte Inglés.
Spanish nationals looking to start using the service will need to download the Android Pay app from the Google Play Store and set it up with a compatible debit or credit card issued by BBVA. Not all of the bank’s cards are supported the service though most of them are expected to become part of the Android Pay ecosystem in the near future. To find out more details about the currently supported cards, refer to the source link below. The move marks the second major expansion of Android Pay this month, with Google recently expanding the scope of the service to 72 new banks and credit unions in the United States.