Key takeaways:
- Google is reforming its digital payments strategy after a failed push into banking, hires PayPal’s Arnold Goldberg to lead the payments division
- Bill Ready, Google’s president of commerce told Bloomberg that “Crypto is something we pay a lot of attention to,” and added that the company’s plans will evolve with user demand
- Google Pay already supports the integration of credit cards by crypto companies, such as Coinbase and Bakkt; there are plans for more such partnerships in the future
Google’s new strategy for its payments division includes crypto
Google, a part of the broader technology conglomerate Alphabet, has hired former PayPal executive Arnold Golberg to chart a new course for the search giant’s payments division after its failed push into banking. Bloomberg reports that the company will be “employing a broader strategy,” and will be open to a wider scope of financial solutions, including digital currencies.
Speaking to Bloomberg, Google’s president of commerce Bill Ready discussed the possibility of integrating crypto into the broader suite of Google’s financial service:
“Crypto is something we pay a lot of attention to. As user demand and merchant demand evolves, we’ll evolve with it.”
Before his stint at Google, Goldberg was the chief product architect and general manager at PayPal, which has been rapidly expanding its portfolio of crypto services ever since it first announced the support for Bitcoin, Ethereum, BCH, and Litecoin in October 2020.
The news of Google’s teaming up with Goldberg to restructure its approach to crypto and financial services, in general, comes three months after the company partnered with digital asset trading platform Bakkt to become its main provider of cloud computing services. As a part of the partnership, Bakkt’s virtual Visa debit cards became available for use on Google Pay, as long as transactions are made in fiat currencies. The search giant inked a similar deal with Coinbase earlier in 2021, when the leading US crypto exchange announced its users would be able to pair their Coinbase Card with Google Pay and Apple Pay.
Ready told Bloomberg that Google intends to make more deals with different cryptocurrency firms in the future, but there are no plans for native cryptocurrency transaction support in the near future.
The Google news had little impact on the broader crypto market – Bitcoin continues to struggle to break the $42,000 resistance and is trading in a narrow range as of late, while the total cryptocurrency market cap barely budged in the last 24 hours.
