Google Pay crosses 150 million users across 40 countries

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Google Pay, the search and technology giant's Unified Payments Interface (UPI), has now crossed the 150 million user mark.

During the company's quarterly earnings call, Google CEO Sundar Pichai expressed his happiness at the milestone, applauding the digital payments initiative in India, saying that it is "certainly what really got everything started".

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"We have 150 million users across 40 countries using Google Pay," said Pichai.

"We're making sure it works across the board, works well, easy to use for all the sites. And then over time, we will innovate and build new digital experiences," he added.

Emphasising the importance of building for scale and simplicity, he said a strong foundation will be the bedrock over which the team builds "additional helpful features".

Earlier this month, WhatsApp announced that it had added an additional 60 million users for its UPI service, after the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) approved the additional bandwidth needed. WhatsApp said that it will now expand its service to 100 million users in total.

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Meanwhile, PhonePe, the Indian digital payments company, announced that it was processing more than 100 million transactions in a single day. PhonePe is currently the leader in the Indian market for UPI, with a 47% share of the monthly transaction volumes.

PhonePe said that it processed more than 2.5 billion transactions in a month, at an annual total payments volume run rate of $780 billion.