Google Pay Africa

A new Google consumer payments app, bringing trust to Sub-Saharan African commerce & relevance for Google, that I got 35 headcount & $10M to build

Role

Lead Product Manager

Industry

Fintech

Duration

1 Year

Google's need for commercial foothold in Africa

Sub-Saharan Africa (with over 1 billion people) is the only major world region where Google products have minimal adoption (not including China of course where they're blocked). The open internet (and hence Search) isn't useful to most Africans - there's little content in their local languages and even less that's relevant to their day-to-day lives. Data costs are the highest in the world so YouTube is both inaccessible and lacking content. Maps data is lacking and most don't think cartographically - in my 3 years living in Kenya and South Africa, not a single driver ever used turn-by-turn navigation. Android phones do dominate and Google has good relationships with the region's top-selling OEMs - for example, Africa is the highest usage region for Android Message (and Files by Google!) given strong pre-install coverage. But because no users are in the revenue-generating, commerce-generating circles of Google, it's both not a priority for Google and a huge missed opportunity.

Pitching & Getting Funding for Google Pay Africa

In 2021, Google saw this gap+opportunity and reserved funds to change this. Through the Build for Africa initiative, product areas pitched concepts that would help Google grow in Africa and Google's corporate venture arm looked for strategic investment deals. The venture team ended up evaluating a local telco & mobile money provider investment and asked my old NBU+GPay team if there was a product partnership opportunity here. So as a 20% project for about 5 months while I was working Maps (with the promise of if it got funded, I would lead the initiative), I developed the product proposal, financial model, etc and, after several exec presentations all the way up to Sundar, we got the green light and including my pitch for 35 headcount and $10M in marketing budget.

Google's need for commercial foothold in Africa

Pitching & Getting Funding for Google Pay Africa

Understanding Financial Challenges & Testing Solutions Google is Uniquely Suited to Provide

The next step was to validate & expand on my initial product pitch, starting with user interviews, but unfortunately, it was the start of 2022 and Google hadn't approved in-person user research yet. So I got my manager to approve just me traveling and pulling together my own user research through my network in Kenya, South Africa, and Nigeria (see Payments in SSA for some of the learnings). There were several interesting underserved areas, much related to the "socialness" of finances in Africa as in my original pitch - P2P/informal commerce (ie most commerce), P2P savings clubs, P2P/social lending - and I organized the team into a series of sprints to investigate which problem areas made strategic self for Google, Google could uniquely solve, do concept & prototype testing with real users, and hone in on the best MVP to start with.

Focusing on Fraud-Protected Informal Commerce Payments

We landed on solving the trust & fraud challenges with informal commerce (ie most commerce in Africa) - not knowing if you can trust the online Instagram dress seller or downtown phone shop continued to show up as a sever, prevalent, and frequent problem for consumers (and sellers) and they would skillfully cope through it. This was also an area that Google could uniquely solve, leveraging Android & other data we have on users as well as our P2P fraud platform & expertise built through GPay India. So the MVP focused on P2P commerce payments with a trust score, reviews and buyer protection, somewhat following PayPal's playbook. From a distribution standpoint, getting users to download a new payments app would be an expensive endeavor so I also worked on a partnership to embed the experience within Android Messages (ie the SMS/RCS messenger preinstalled on many Android devices and the vast majority in Africa).

a cell phone with a yellow rectangular screen

Developing a Rails Partner

A final hurdle was finding a payment rails partner - we needed to be able to initiate money being moved from one consumer's bank account to another, which required licenses in most African countries (something Google staunchly wanted to stay away from) and connective infrastructure (also know as “rails”, like “train rails” in the payments world). This is where the corp dev local telco & mobile money partner was supposed to come in but sadly, we discovered they'd overpromised on these fronts (and other things which was making the Google investment also seem tenuous). So I also started to look for backup options here:

Launch in South Africa leverage RTP - This was the central banked-backed real time payment rails that were modeled after India's UPI. It was supposed to be piloted with 1 bank partner at the end of 2022 and, while still uncertain, the hope was the the central bank would mandate all the big SA banks to participate (really the only reason India and Brazil's real time payment systems were such successes and why every other country that has tried this from Mexico to Thailand's hasn't been). If these other banks participated, we could use RPP as our rails but there was uncertainty there.
Find another fintech infra startup/partner - At the time, there were some fintech infra providers but many focused on cross border payments (rather than having high financial institution coverage in a single country like we needed) or didn't cover the licensing side of things.

Unfortunately, while we were in the midst of developing the MVP and finalizing this rails partnership, Build for Africa and all the funding tied to it was put on pause, then a month later the entire Next Billion Users 10-year-old team was cancelled & reallocated, and a month later Google had it's first mass layoff in it's 20 year history.

Other projects

Nova

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ConnectMed

An African digital health startup that offered telehealth apps, kiosks, & chronic disease therapeutics - started in my MSc CompSci & ended in Merck KGaA asset sale

Google Pay API

Making online checkouts better, by me growing usage of Google Pay API & adding new forms of payment like BNPL & e-wallets

Files by Google

The leading Android file & storage manager that I led from 100M to 250M MAUs, including getting it preinstalled on Google Pixel & taking over DocumentsUI