Google halts plans for Google Pay-based banking service

Google has stopped engaged on its Plex service, which aimed to allow you to do your banking by the Google Pay app. The service was purported to let customers join checking or financial savings accounts supplied by a wide range of conventional banks that the person would then handle by the app. According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, Google canceled the undertaking attributable to a sequence of missed deadlines and since an government who pushed for the undertaking left the corporate.

Plex wasn’t meant to place Google in direct competitors with banks, in keeping with reviews that came out before the corporate revealed this system and knowledge from its official announcement. Instead, Google deliberate to companion with a wide range of monetary establishments that may have offered accounts with out month-to-month or overdraft charges and with out minimal balances. Like another on-line banks, Google’s app would have let customers set issues like financial savings targets and computerized transfers. Some of the banks Google deliberate to companion with included Citi and SEFCU.

In an e mail on Friday, Google advised The Verge that it nonetheless believes there’s demand from shoppers for less complicated methods to pay for issues whereas buying each on-line and in-person however that it’ll now be specializing in “delivering digital enablement for banks and other financial services providers rather than us serving as the provider of these services.” It’s doable, then, that we’ll see a few of Plex’s options present up in Google Pay sooner or later — or we could see Google proceed work on its redesigned Google Pay app.

While there are nonetheless different choices for individuals who need on-line banks with first rate apps, it’s unlucky to see that Google’s canceled this undertaking. Not solely wouldn’t it have offered extra conventional banks incentive to step up their cell app sport, however an enormous function like this getting axed earlier than its launch doesn’t assist with Google’s fame for not sticking with merchandise it launches. Still, it’s higher that Google put a halt to it now if it wasn’t going to be dedicated to it — as a former Google Wallet debit card holder, I can say from private expertise that having to cope with altering the way you pay for issues is far more of a ache than, say, having to discover a new strategy to learn RSS.