Google Pay’s disastrous year continues, promised bank account feature is dead

Google’s grand plan to launch Google bank accounts is dead. As part of its big relaunch last year, the Google Pay division promised to launch “Plex,” a digital banking service from Google. After a disastrous year for Google Pay that included a botched app overhaul and an exodus of employees from the division, a Wall Street Journal report now says Google’s bank account plans are dead.

Plex was officially announced almost two years ago and heavily promoted on the Google Pay website and app, with a waitlist that users could sign up for. The service would have been a “mobile first” banking app with physical cards, lower fees, and plenty of expense visualizations. I mean something like “I can’t imagine anyone wanting a Google bank account” given privacy concerns and the instability of new Google products, but the Wall Street Journal reports there were 400 000 people on the waiting list.

Google was partnering with Citigroup, Stanford Federal Credit Union, and a few other banks for the service, and all were apparently not in the plan to cancel Plex. The Wall Street Journal report ends with a rather sad paragraph:

As recently as this week, several banks felt the project was still moving forward. Monday, BM Technologies Inc. said its Plex accounts would arrive in late 2021 or 2022. “Google and BMTX are excited about this opportunity and are committed to this partnership,” the banking platform said in an email at the time.

The reason for the cancellation appears to be due to the Google Pay upheaval we learned about earlier in the year. In August, Business Insider reported that “dozens of employees and executives have left” the Google Payments team in recent months, including “at least seven team leaders with director or vice president roles.” .

In March of this year, Google Pay launched a disastrous overhaul. Google shut down the perfectly performing and mature service that had existed since the days of Google Wallet, and the company replaced it with a whole new codebase that was originally developed in India. India-centric Google Pay (which was billed as the new global Google Pay) was modeled after WhatsApp and used your phone number as its identity. Requiring a SIM card for identity meant the functionality of the Google Pay website had to be shut down, multiple accounts were no longer supported, and users had to rebuild their contact lists to send money.

This all happened in March with the forced shutdown of the old Google Pay app in the United States, and what’s amazing about it is that Google’s vice president of payments, Caesar Sengupta, has left the company in April, a month later. Sengupta blew up Google’s payment system and left before the transition was complete. He left without ever bringing the new Google Pay up to the standards of the old app. Today, the revamped Google Pay is even worse than the old app, and Google Pay is still fragmented internationally. Some countries remain on the new Google Pay app; some remain on the old Google Pay app.

Sengupta’s departure would have triggered the exodus which included “dozens” of employees. BI’s report includes a quote from an anonymous former employee who says Google Pay “was not progressing at the rate we wanted” and people were getting more and more frustrated. An employee told Business Insider that “Plex was completely [Vice President] Felix [Lin] and Caesar [Sengupta’s] original idea, “the two executives no longer work at Google, and with the demise of Plex’s biggest boosters, it’s no surprise that the project is dead.

Google Pay is currently in a terrible state of limbo, and it’s unclear what the future of the service is. Plex was supposed to be a major feature of the new Google Pay. But with his death and the architects of this whole overhaul no longer at Google, the division looks like a rudderless mess.

Any mention of Plex was removed from Google Pay’s website on Friday. Google sent the following statement.

Our work with our partners has clearly shown that there is consumer demand for simple, transparent and secure digital payments for online and in-store transactions. We are updating our approach to focus primarily on providing digital empowerment for banks and other financial service providers rather than serving ourselves as a provider of those services.

We believe this is the best way for Google to help consumers gain better access to financial services and help the financial services ecosystem connect more deeply with their customers in a digital environment.