The Product Tales: Google Pay

The Product Tales is a blog series that aspires to encourage readers to dig deeper into the digital products which one may come across on a daily basis. The blog’s objective is to highlight the end-to-end thought process behind the business model of these products so that the reader gets a root-level understanding of the same.

Launched by Google on Sept 18, 2017, G Pay has experienced massive growth in the P2P segment and is currently the market leader with a 44% share. It was launched an year after demonetization, at a time when digital payments in India was gaining stream. Backed by the trust of the Google brand, it has captured the market effectively. Some of its objectives are:

•Transfer Money

•Bill Payments

•Pay for domestic needs

•Check bank balance

Revenue Model

It has multiple revenue sources:

•Commissions from recharge

•Commissions from bill payments

•Commissions from partners

•No revenue from UPI

The following analysis is from the perspective of Indian users.

Underserved Needs

(The following has been collected based on the reviews from Google PlayStore, Apple Store page)

• “I can’t find the QR scanner option. It is very small in size. It should be more prominent”
• “QR scanner does not function in the dark”
• “Whenever I want to pay my friend, I search for his name. Sometimes I don't find it, despite knowing he has a GPay account”
• “The merchant sometimes sends me an image of the QR code in WhatsApp. There is no feature which allows me to pay this way”
• “I buy tea every day from a nearby shop. There should be a direct payment option. It would save me time”
• “With G-Pay, payment has become so easy that I lose track of how much I am spending”
• “I would like to have a split option which would save me the hassles of using any other app and then requesting the amount to the respective people”

The Need Matrix for the issues

Value Proposition

Feature Set

Recommendations

I would recommend adding an expense tracker feature as well as a split feature as it would solve the user’s pain point of splitting the bills and requesting the amount. Instead, the split feature must be available at the time of payment to make it easier and quicker. All the other features that I would like to incorporate into the app are mentioned in the table (above)

The features above that I have come up with are based on my ideas, as well as based on articles I read up on a few websites :)