Technology giant Google is reportedly going to abandon its plans to offers bank account services on its payment app Google Pay.
The news, which was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, comes after the tech giant reportedly missed deadlines for the product’s launch and the departure of a key executive overseeing the project.
“Our work with our partners has made it extremely clear that there’s consumer demand for simple, seamless and secure digital payments for online and in-store transactions,” Google’s spokesperson was quoted by several media houses as saying.
“We are updating our approach to focus primarily on delivering digital enablement for banks and other financial services providers rather than us serving as the provider of these services,” the spokesperson added.
Google had been working with partners such as Citi bank to offer a new digital checking and savings account, called Plex.
The user could open a Plex account using Google Pay, which was launched in 2015 and is said to have a user base of 150 million.
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By GlobalDataThe work of updating the Google Pay app began on the watch of Caesar Sengupta, who was the vice president of the payments business and led the firm’s Next Billion Users initiative till his departure in March.
By the time Sengupta’s successor, Bill Ready, a former PayPal Holdings executive took charge, the project had missed several deadlines, and Ready decided to pull the plug, a person familiar with the matter told Bloomberg.
Google is not the first tech giant trying to venture into the financial services space.
According to Wall Street Journal, in 2018, Amazon had reportedly planned to offer checking account services to its customers.