Google Pay launched on select Android devices in Germany earlier this week, having been introduced with support for four local banks. Customers of Wirecard, Comdirect, N26, and Commerzbank are hence able to link their accounts with their Google Pay profiles immediately, with the system supporting virtually all Visa and MasterCard cards. Revolut and LBBW will be added to Google’s mobile payment ecosystem in the near future, the German arm of the company revealed, without providing additional details on the matter. Refer to the banner below to download the latest version of Google Pay for Android.
While its day-one list of supported banks already grants it access to millions of potential customers, Google Pay has a long way to go before it’s actually adopted by retailers. The Mountain View, California-based tech giant already struck some high-profile partnerships to promote its latest service, including those with Adidas and McDonald’s. Kaufland, Lidl, MediaMarkt, Saturn, Hornbach, and Aldi Sud are also supporting the service from launch, whereas a number of online storefronts are following suit. Those include Ryanair, Asos, Flixbus, Hotel Tonight, and Deliveroo.
The development marks a major milestone for Google Pay, with Germany being Europe’s largest economy and hence a potentially highly lucrative market for the Alphabet-owned firm. After Android Pay and Google Wallet were unified under a single brand earlier this year, the tech giant resolved to collaborate with PayPal to fully integrated one of the world’s most popular online payment services into its own ecosystem. This spring, the company also started rolling out a desktop browser version of Google Pay and vowed to continue expanding the global availability of the service in the second half of the year. As is the case with all other proprietary solutions from the internet juggernaut, Google Pay is likely to be natively supported by the Pixel 3 lineup of Android flagships which is expected to be officially announced in early October.