You brought up a good question about NFC and how Google is traditionally associated with the cloud. Sounds like they’ll start with NFC and bridge it into the cloud with other technologies to bring merchants and consumers together – this will be interesting.

Posted by wonder bra, 16/05/2012 12:37pm (5 days ago)

Very nice interview Karen, good questions!

While Osama indicated that one of their main strategic goals is to take a larger piece of a company's advertising/marketing budget (upwards of 30-40%, which he indicated Google now only receives about 5%), I have a hard time to believe that ongoing transaction revenue is not a major component of their “master plan”. There is too much money in payment processing to think that market share revenue is their sole focus in generating income.


You brought up a good question about NFC and how Google is traditionally associated with the cloud. Sounds like they’ll start with NFC and bridge it into the cloud with other technologies to bring merchants and consumers together – this will be interesting.


Given the fact that one of the early requests by consumers is more banks and processors, and that Osama claims Google is a great partner to the eco-system, you would think they would want to reach out to more independent, payment gateway providers that are already connected to all the major banks/processors. Finding a gateway provider who is not tied to any bank, processor, Merchant Services Provider (MSP), Independent Sales Organization (ISO), etc. that allow merchants the choice to freely move between banks/processors, I think would be of great interest to Google trying to gain market share.


For example, Osama spoke about how he believes that by 2015 every terminal will have NFC in it; well that’s well and good for Google, but you have to look at the merchant side as well. What about EMV (Chip and PIN) for the US? Merchants have to worry about implementing this new, high-cost technology by 2015. Not to mention when EMV rules change (as they periodically do) they have to re-certified and/or update their systems, which again is costly both in money and resources. What about Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance and countless other merchant and developer concerns?


Having a payment gateway that can step-in and remove the heavy lifting a merchant/developer must go through when implementing these changes gives them the ability to focus on their core business and work more easily with Google in targeting consumers and increasing market share, rather than working on their payment processing conundrums.

Thank you for sharing!

Posted by Steven Renville, 02/12/2011 7:06pm (6 months ago)