Google Pay has hired Arnold Goldberg, PayPal’s chief product architect to replace its former payments head Caesar Sengupta, Bloomberg reported.
Bill Ready, Google president of commerce and also former PayPal executive, said the departure marked an overhaul of the division. He told Bloomberg that the service has “no intention of being a bank” but that it will focus on being a “comprehensive digital wallet that includes digital tickets, airline passes, and vaccine passports." Tickets and covid cards are already Google Pay features. Ready added that the company is also paying attention to crypto. “As user demand and merchant demand evolves, we’ll evolve with it.” Right now, Google partners with Coinbase and BitPay to store cards, but does not accept cryptocurrency for transactions.
Sengupta left the company in April 2021, one month after Google Pay introduced its new app in the US, replacing the old Google Pay app that had been on the market for years. The launch was not a success, ArsTechnica notes, saying the new app was originally developed for India and was very different from the one used in the US, using a phone number for identification instead of a Google account. This meant that many features US users were accustomed to were no longer supported, such as the Pay website functionality and multi-device functionality. The went out the window, and Google Pay went from supporting multiple accounts to only supporting a single account.
An August report from Business Insider noted that Sengupta's departure led to many others leaving, including "seven leaders on the team with roles of director or vice president" among the dozens of employees and executives who left, leaving "half the people working on the business-development team." By October, reports said Google's plans to launch consumer bank accounts were out. Google had already promoted the service in several blog posts and had 400,000 people who had signed up for the waitlist to get an account.
