Google Pay API

After being so frustrated by Google Pay Africa never fully launching, I then worked, along with a great team, to ensure we got the pilot launched that year (within 6-8 months) and we generated the first revenue Google Pay (from the API to Wallet) had ever brought in. Some of my learnings:

• Smartly leverage existing payment infrastructure/networks - In this case, we connected with the BNPLs by having them issue a virtual PAN for each transaction, rather than trying to do a custom integration that would have taken years on Google's side. It also would have meant our merchants would have had to make changes to accept the BNPLs. By leveraging existing cards rails and infra, we could launch multiple BNPL partners across all our merchatns with less than 6 months of engineering effort. 

• Create FOMO with partners - Afterpay was dragging their feet but when they heard we had Affirm and they'd be featured in the launch press, they ran very quickly to be included in our initial launch. GPay never discloses our merchant/distribution numbers so these partners had little to go-on if the partnership would be fruitful to them. Klarna said they'd only partner if there was exclusivity but low and behold after we launched, they came on board thereafter, still with little data shared on impact. 

See the Techcrunch article and PYMTs article on the launch.

Store Value Wallets for GPay

As mentioned, the Google Pay suite (from the API to Google Wallet) is pretty irrelevant in non-card markets and could be much more relevant by offering local payment methods. In Asia, stored value wallets are the primary digital payment form though cards are increasing in usage for the top income brackets as they work internationally and can get more credit+benefits from them generally (but merchant adoption given card fees is still a restiance point). The product pitch here was more complex and less of a home run as BNPL - I had to really dig into the current product experience with digital wallets at online checkouts, the market dynamics, and work closely with our (great) market teams to try to see where GPay could provide value.

What I landed on was the friction consumers felt at checkout by having to switch between apps - in most cases, users would get deeplinked into their wallet app, sometimes with the merchant payment details being lost in the process, make the payment, come back to the merchant app, and then hope it worked. Google already had integrations with the top digital wallets in this region in order to accept payments from consumers on Google Play and the like (ie 1st Party, 1P payments) so Google did have their data. We just needed to make it accessible to the API (our third party payments, 3P payments stack) and make consumers aware that we had them there (levergaing the dynamic button and other things mentioned above).

We did need some effort from digital wallet providers so, facilitated by our market teams, I did an online roadshow with wallets across the region and then went to Malaysia and Thailand in person (top pilot markets given the high % of user payment info), finally landing on Malaysia with Touch n Go and Shopee Pay to launch the pilot. Developing the product required influence & coordination between several internal eng teams and Shopee and Touch n Go's eng  team, but we made steady progress (thankfully organizational complexity is something I'd gotten good at over 5 years at Google).