NEW DELHI: Hailing the India digital payments growth story, Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai has said that the company’s payments strategy is very similar to the strategy it has for commerce overall.

During the company’s quarterly earnings call, Pichai said that the digital payments work in India is “certainly what really got everything started”.

“We now have 150 million people across 40 countries using Google Pay. 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,” Pichai said in April. He emphasised that the company seeks Google Pay to work smoothly, both on the merchant and the financial institution side, “and making sure they can connect with the customers well”.

“We are really building for scale, building for simplicity. And then over time, we will layer on additional helpful features,” Pichai added. According to the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), unified payments interface (UPI) processed 5.04 billion transactions till March 29, amounting to Rs 8.88 trillion.

This was 11.5 per cent higher than the volume of transactions processed in February and 7.5 per cent higher in terms of value of transactions processed. The Indian digital payment space is currently dominated by PhonePe, Google Pay and Paytm.