Google's New Plan To Push Google Pay in India: Cashback Incentives in Android Apps

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google is gunning for India's payment companies. The U.S. search giant entered India's payment space in 2017, and now it is hatching an initiative that could boost usage of its Google Pay service by tying it tightly to Android apps in the country. The company has built an in-app engagement rewards platform that promises to help developers and businesses retain users and drive engagement on their apps, two sources familiar with the matter said. It plans to formally launch the project through partners using an SDK later this year, TechCrunch understands.

Sitting at the core of this new play is Google Pay, which will be used for transactions between businesses and users, thereby expanding the reach of Google's payment service. Internally dubbed as Project Cruiser, the initiative has been in works since last year and it is led by Google's Next Billion Users team, sources said. Executives from the company have reached out to several businesses in India in recent months to coax them into coming on board, they added. The platform, if incorporated by developers into their apps, will allow app developers to incentivize users to perform certain actions in their app in a 'scalable' fashion. For example, placing their first order, invite friends or adding a payment method, will all result in users earning a small sum of money.

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