Google Pay coming to the Philippines confirmed

Google Pay is coming to the Philippines soon 12 as per TG Ramakrishnan, Strategic Partnerships LEad of Google Pay APAC. At the Singapore Fintech Festival (SFF), he said that all 11 ASEAN countries will be covered ‘over the next 18 to 24 months’.

At the moment, it’s currently available in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam. However, it’s expected to be available in the Philippines sooner than later.

Jeffrey Navarro, Visa Philippines Country Manager said that ‘I think safe to say, this year,’ when asked about its arrival. Visa is one of Google’s partners for deploying its payments platform in several countries.

In August, we previously reported that Google Pay doesn’t need to register as an Operator of Payment Systems (OPS) with the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP). They’re classified as a technical service provider (TSP) instead.
Ramakrishnan clarified that Google Wallet is not an e-wallet like GCash or Maya. It works by storing digital versions of credit cards, debit cards, and digital IDs and keys.

In other words, Google Pay is another tool to help you present these in a simpler way. Still, local payment service providers (PSPs) like banks need to partner with Google Pay and Apple Pay to integrate their card-issuing systems as per the BSP.

Notably, GoTyme Bank quietly confirmed Google Pay coming to the Philippines soon. In a Reddit post, we saw that Google Pay and Apple Pay were part of their community gathering roadmap for what’s next.

Mukhang malapit na. Google Pay & Apple Pay
byu/Repulsive-War-2871 inDigitalbanksPh

This translates into the bank possibly already working with Google Pay to tokenize or replace sensitive data like bank account details. This is to prevent fraud by using a unique and randomly generated string of characters, also called tokens.