Friction is desirable in fintech. We don’t want to walk the path of fastest finger first: Google Pay exec

Sharath Bulusu, Director, Product Management, Google Pay

With around a 35 percent share of all united payments interface (UPI) transactions, Google Pay is arguably one of the biggest fintech platforms in India. On the one hand, this presents the company with a large opportunity to tap into the massively underserved financial services market in the country.

But it also means that the fintech platform has to grapple with a rapidly evolving regulatory landscape in terms of digital payments, online credit disbursal, data protection, etc. Earlier this week, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that India should balance user safety and an open internet with regulatory stability and support for innovation.

On the sidelines of the annual Google for India event, Moneycontrol sat down with Google Pay director of product management Sharath Bulusu to talk about fintech regulations, its approach to personal data protection, designing fintech products for user safety, and more.

No. At this point, we don’t have to actively do it. It’s still very early days for UPI and the market will grow a lot more. When things grow this fast, it is hard to predict what shape things take eventually.

Our general viewpoint is that a lot of these things should get settled by a pro-innovation approach in a vibrant market. Setting an artificial boundary does not make sense this early in the process.

At this stage, we don’t have anything to announce in the other spaces. We think credit is a massively underserved market in India and there’s a lot of work that remains to be done in this space. On the consumer side, we have launched with two lenders and also enabled users to get a credit card from Axis Bank. For the merchant side as well, there are two lenders.

Although we can’t share the numbers, what we can say is that we are continuing to invest because we see traction. As a person building the product, I would like to be able to brag about the numbers at some point.

We don’t do the underwriting or determine the credit risk of an individual. That is one more reason that we want transparency on who the lender is. Our job is to just connect a user who has become comfortable in doing digital transactions with a lender. We don’t share our data with lenders or use it to push a credit decision.

We actually give users control over what data they want to share for personalisation which is turned off by default. Even within that, we are very clear about not sharing this kind of data with the lenders. We are just a trusted digital surface for the user to connect with a lender. Once we connect you to the lender digitally, they might ask you for other information.

For both consumer and merchant loan products, we keep the identity of the lender front and centre. Yes, users have a certain amount of trust in Google. But we want the user to make sure that they know who is providing the credit on what terms. I think it's a matter of strategy for different companies to choose whether they want to do a white label model where the name of the lender is invisible, and it looks like they're the lender, versus our take.

In fact, we even show a very clear message to the user saying, if you agree to continue, you will go into an experience being powered by such and such lenders.

Friction can’t be the only aspect to think about. Also, friction might sometimes be desirable for privacy, safety and transparency. Often, a thing that keeps your information private could make it harder to do a helpful prediction. Now, where do you draw the line? A thing that keeps you safe is going to add some friction because it will say, ‘Hey, check what you're doing’, right?

We still have a lot of novice users. And we want to keep getting tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of them over the next few years as UPI grows. So I think there is a responsibility there of making sure that we don't just walk the path of the fastest finger first.

We keep on doing different kinds of pilots with different devices…  In the Google Pay app for businesses, we have enabled audio alerts for merchants. Now, beyond that, we may create more experiences for merchants to get these alerts more easily. We keep piloting these things.

We are not ready to announce the exact dates yet. But users should start seeing it very soon as the specs are out now. In fact, we have already enabled the merchant side to accept RuPay credit payments via UPI. On the consumer side, some testing and development are going on.