Tech giant Google has given users of its Google Pay service the ability to see what credit card rewards they can earn when making online purchases, according to a Wednesday blog post.

The new feature is available today to U.S. customers paying with an American Express or Capital One card on Google’s Chrome web browser on desktop computers. During checkout, customers will see card benefits listed next to the cards, enabling them to choose which card to pay with based on the benefits they’d receive for that purchase.

Gaining insight into card rewards was “the number one thing” Google Pay users asked Mountain View, California-based Google to provide, Google Pay Vice President and General Manager Ben Volk said in a Tuesday interview. The company’s goal is to expand the program to all card issuers, he said. 

Google Pay will continue to build features based on user feedback, with the goal of driving more adoption of the service, Volk said. In addition to the card rewards feature, Google also announced that it was expanding its buy now, pay later partnerships with Affirm and Zip as well as giving users the ability to use biometric authentication for digital payments, according to the blog post.

The new product features come as Google gets ready to retire the Google Pay mobile app next month, a move the company announced in February. The tech giant has had different and sometimes overlapping versions of the payment service, along with its own digital wallet since 2011. Volk defined Google Pay as “paying with your Google account” and Google’s digital wallet as a container holding payment methods, along with other things.

This new focus is meant to promote convenience and security, Volk said. 

“Anywhere you see the Google Pay mark or the GPay logo, it's a place where you can use your Google account to pay,” he said. “It's like, ‘how do we make it that much easier? And how can we add utility to the Google account to make it that much easier for people to pay?’”

By James Pothen on May 22, 2024
Original link