Google will offer checking accounts starting next year.
This move by Google will place it alongside other financial services associated with large technology companies. The service will have an association with banking entities and will start operating from next year.
Google will offer them, but will not handle them
Although Google will be the one offering checking accounts for their consumers, financial activities and account management will be done by their partners. This project, which they have nicknamed “Cache”, already has the support of Citigroup and Stanford Federal Credit Union, who seek to attract a new younger clientele that prefers to carry out business activities from the internet.
Although it seems that Google as an intermediary will not earn anything since they will not be the ones in charge of managing the accounts, it turns out that they will have access to important information of the users who open the checking accounts.
Caesar Sengupta from Google indicated to WSJ that in this way they will try to offer advantages for consumers and different reward programs. Another possibility that they continue to consider is that of not charging for the services of the accounts, which would represent a great advantage with respect to the checking accounts of some other banks.
However, this may not please all users, as they would be offering sensitive information to Google, a company that already has enough personal data through their other services.
Although the tech giant maintains that the data that’s been collected through Google Pay has never been used for advertising purposes or has been sold to merchants, the future outlook is very difficult for this initiative to be accepted by the masses. The concerns over privacy are often simply about a company having access to so much data, regardless of whether it’s used for advertising services.
Financial services and technology companies
This is not the only way Google has ventured into money management as a service. They already have products like Google Pay and Google Wallet, where users can send money to other people.
The number of technology-oriented companies that are slowly beginning to give financial options is growing rapidly. At the beginning of the week, Facebook announced its own digital payment system, and earlier this year they presented the “Libra” cryptocurrency.
Apple also has its payment methods and recently introduced the Apple Card which, despite being also regulated by banking partners, is more of a service controlled by Apple.
