Google’s subsidiary, Alphabet Inc., has hired former PayPal Senior Vice President and Chief Product Architect Arnold Goldberg to lead its payments division, according to media reports. Google has hired Goldberg to help reset ambitions for banking and payments.
The search and advertising giant plans to delve deeply into other financial services, including, cryptocurrency debit cards. This comes just three months after abandoning a strategy to let Google Pay users to create checking and savings accounts via its proposed Plex service. Prior to this, Google has historically avoided offering crypto as part of its financial services.
President of Commerce Bill Ready told the media, “Crypto is something we pay a lot of attention to. As user demand and merchant demand evolves, we’ll evolve with it.” Google didn’t provide any further detail about its crypto plans.
Prior to this, Arnold has served as the chief product architect and general manager at PayPal, where he led the company’s core checkout and merchant services businesses. Google Pay, the company’s digital wallet for online and contactless mobile payment has made some great strides into the crypto space already. In March 2020, Google Pay added integration for Coinbase card, a Visa debit card that enables Bitcoin payments. Google Pay users can include the card details on their Android phones and start buying things in Bitcoin.
In August 2021, after months of integrating with Apple Pay, Bitpay Mastercards came to Google Pay as well. And in October 2021, Bakkt announced that debit cardholders could use it in tandem with Google Pay to buy goods and services with Bitcoin.