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Android Pay

As some of you may recall, I had the great good fortune to be asked to interview Spencer X from Google on the main stage at Money 2020 Europe in Copenhagen.

Before I go on to what was discussed, let me first just go on record to sat what a great guy Spencer is. We discussed the general area of questions, but we did not discuss specific questions and we didn't rehearse any questions or answers. As a result, the interaction was interesting and lively and got great feedback from the delegates. I think companies and speakers can often benefit greatly from being a little less scripted at an event like this, so thanks to Spencer and Google for a great discussion. Oh, and for my VIP ticket to the Rudimental party in the evening. I'd never had a "Moscow Mule" before, and now I won't drink anything else.

The reason that Spencer was in town was that AndroidPay is launching in Europe, starting with the UK. What most people in the audience were interested in was whether Google would charge the same “toll” to issuing banks as Apple does. 

“We’re certainly not tolling the issuing banks, we are not going to toll the merchants who are already under enormous pressure. Android needs to be best in class, it’s really very simple. Payments has to work and it has to work seamlessly.”

From Android Pay to expand into Europe ‘soon’ - Mobile Banking

The answer was no, and I assume it is because Google benefits from the data associated with the payment so the relatively minor toll that they could extract for the payment is nothing compared to being able to link purchases to searches and that sort of thing. Anyway, Spencer covered a whole bunch of interesting as aspects of AndroidPay to give us some indication of where it might go in the future.

A trial in the Bay Area involving 50 small businesses and 50  McDonald’s restaurants is allowing Google to hide payments in the background of retail transactions. It’s called Handsfree, it was announced at Google’s developer conference last month, and while this technology is admittedly in its “early days” as Spinnell puts it, it’s indicative of a future we’re heading toward where your identity matters more than your phone.

From Money20/20 Europe: Android Pay Handsfree is Easier Than Tapping

His main point, if I remember correctly, when challenged as to AndroidPay’s competitive positioning against the other “xPays” was that AndroidPay would be open. They intended to compete on APIs and SDKs and by exposing the AndroidPay functionality so that innovative developers can build on top of it. I was thinking about this because of a couple of discussions I’ve been in with clients recently about making the transition from selling propositions directly to customers to selling propositions to the developers who develop the customer propositions. Switching from persuading customers to use your service to persuading developers to use your service is hard. As I’m sure you’ll appreciate, it’s not just a matter of hanging out an API and hoping.

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