Google Pay is bringing on a new executive who it hopes will turn the beleaguered division around. Bloomberg reports that Arnold Goldberg, PayPal's ch

Google Pay hopes to recover from brutal 2021 with new leadership

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2022-01-20 20:30:08

Google Pay is bringing on a new executive who it hopes will turn the beleaguered division around. Bloomberg reports that Arnold Goldberg, PayPal's chief product architect, will now run Google Pay after the former payments chief, Caesar Sengupta, left in April.

This new app was originally developed for India and is dramatically different from the old Google Pay app used in the US. For starters, the new app switched to using a phone number for your identity instead of a Google account, which meant that a ton of features US users were accustomed to were no longer supported. Indian consumers are used to phone number identity thanks to apps like WhatsApp, and the limitations are not a big deal for them thanks to smartphones being many consumers' only device.

For Google Pay in the US, however, relying on a SIM card for identity meant the Google Pay website functionality had to die, multi-device functionality went out the window, and Google Pay went from supporting multiple accounts to only supporting a single account. As we wrote shortly after launch day, the new app was a disaster.