Shutterstock
There are already services on the market such as Venmo (which is owned by PayPal) that let you pay for things using your smartphone. Now Google will give consumers more options as it plans to introduce an array of payment products, including a peer-to-peer service that will enable money transfers between people directly from their smartphones, The New York Times reports.
Android Pay will be a mobile payments API that allows third party apps to complete payments directly through their apps. Google already has its mobile payment product, Google Wallet, but experts say that can be integrated with apps that use Google Wallet. And in February, Google announced it would be separate from Google Wallet.
This move will give Google access to the mobile payments industry, one that is expected to reach $142 billion by 2019, according to a Forrester Research report cited by the NYT.
The announcement was made at Google I/O, the company’s annual conference for software developers, reports Business Insider. For other announcements, you can follow the #io15 hashtag on Twitter.
