Android Pay Is Very Close to Launch, a Google Executive Declares

By John Stewart

Ever since Google Inc. announced its Android Pay mobile-payments service a little more than three months ago, the online search giant has been mum about when the service will be launched. But a Google executive on Tuesday hinted in a public forum that the launch is likely around the corner and will be accompanied by heavy consumer promotion.

“The rollout will happen very, very soon. I’d be very surprised if, say, by November [an Android phone] user doesn’t know what Android Pay is,” said Jack Connors, head of commerce partnerships at Google.

Connors, who spoke at the Mobile Payments Conference in Chicago, said merchants can expect a very different approach from Android Pay with respect to customer data than what they saw with Google Wallet, a predecessor product that was introduced four years ago. Wallet stumbled in part because of merchant suspicions about how Google was gathering transaction data and the use they might put it to.

Android Pay will collect very little data, essentially the card being used and the amount, Connors assured the audience. “We have made a very dramatic change in our data policy from Google Wallet,” he said. “We actually get very little data. We get tokens, we pass the tokens. We don’t know card numbers. What data we do get is not part of any monetization strategy.” He did not, however, say what the monetization strategy will be for Android Pay.

Connors said Android Pay will be available on all Android phones supporting near-field communication (NFC) and the KitKat version and above, including devices from Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., which has launched a competing mobile-payments service called Samsung Pay. “A Samsung user will get to choose whether to use Android Pay or Samsung Pay,” he told the audience. “It keeps us honest. We hope we’ll get our fair share.”

Connors confirmed that a crucial technology for Android Pay is a feature called Smart Tap, which allows proprietary merchant loyalty cards and gift cards to be used within the NFC connection set up by Android Pay. Smart Tap was among the technologies Google acquired from Softcard, a mobile-payments project sponsored by the nation’s largest mobile network operators. “When the opportunity to acquire the Softcard assets came up, the one we wanted most was [Smart Tap],” said Connors

Because of this technology, “the in-store experience should be dramatically better than the Google Wallet experience was,” Connors said. “You unlock the wallet, tap it, and you’re done.”

Google Wallet will continue as a separate product but will be confined to such functions as person-to-person payments. “Google Wallet will be a much smaller-footprint wallet,” Connors said. Google has never revealed how many consumers adopted Google Wallet, but the number was apparently disappointing. Google overhauled Wallet a number of times before announcing Android Pay. Connors referred to “those precious numbers of users who used [Google Wallet]—unfortunately, it wasn’t enough.”

Still, Connors stopped short of revealing a launch date for Android Pay. “Hang on tight,” he urged the audience, repeating that “it’s coming soon.”