Google loses two executives: one for messaging and workspace, and one for payments

Google had a couple of high-profile CEOs leaving this week. The first was Bill Reddy, “Head of Commerce, Payments, and Next Billion Users at Google,” who left to become CEO of Pinterest. The second big departure is Javier Soltero, who was the vice president and general manager of Google Workspace, Google’s paid business app, and pioneered Google Messaging. Both executives have made major changes to Google in their nearly three-year tenure at the company. Now that they’re gone, it’s not clear what the future of their products holds.

He was only ready at Google for two and a half years, leading his iconic movement catastrophic design Big renewal for Google Pay. The new Google Pay app was led by the Ready Payments team, led by another recently ousted CEO, Caesar Sengupta. A revamp of Google Pay brought an app originally developed for India to the US, where phone number-based identity requirements came with a huge list of cuts: Google Pay had to be stripped of its payment functionality, the app no ​​longer supports multiple accounts, and you can’t sign in to Multiple devices.

The launch of the new app was also clumsy. Slowly, over the course of a month or two, users were kicked out of the old Google Pay and had to move to a new app. The new identity system was not compatible with previous versions of Google Pay, which means that users who are still using the old app cannot send money to users on the new app.

The new Google Pay was announced one year after Google’s Ready period and launched in March 2021. The app initially came with big plans for expansion, including a wild advertisement of Google-branded bank accounts. Sengupta left Google one month After the US launch of the new Google Pay service, which led to a “mass exodus” of employees, according to Insider. The report said “dozens of employees and executives” left the payments team after Sengupta’s departure, with one employee saying there was “frustration” that the new Google Pay “wasn’t growing at the rate we wanted.”

What happened next looks like a complete cancellation of the original “New Google Pay” game plan. Google generally launches a product in the US first and then slowly rolls it out to the rest of the world, but after the initial poor reception, Google Pay hasn’t seen a wide launch outside the US. The Google canceled Its highly-promoted plans for a Google bank account were promoted, although, according to the Wall Street Journal, the company already had 400,000 curious users who signed up for the public queue.

ready eye New Payments Leader in January, a move Bloomberg It has been described as a “reset” of Google’s payments strategy. Ready also made headlines at the time by saying, “Crypto is something we pay a lot of attention to,” even though no Google product has appeared.

Four months later, in Google I/O 2022And the else It was announced that Google Pay would be renewed, rebranding the product to “Google Wallet”. That’s right, after a major revamp of the Google Payments app in 2021, there’s now another new one in 2022. Ready now leaves five months after hiring a new payments lead and putting those plans in motion, but it won’t be around for the launch of Google Wallet. Between the departure of old payments captain Sengupta, chief Sengupta, ready, and “dozens” of team members, it certainly looks like the batch team ended up cleaning the house.

At the heart of the Google payments turmoil may be the truth bone Estimates It placed Google Pay in 3-4 percent of the NFC payments market in the US, well below Apple’s 92 percent market share. It’s an embarrassing loss considering that Google pioneered NFC payments and entered the market Three years before Apple.

A big part of Google’s payment issues is this kind of instability, with Google’s payment app working across four different brands in 10 years (Google Wallet, then Android Pay, then Google Pay, and now Google Wallet again). The company doesn’t seem to have come up with a great solution with the new Google Wallet. The current plan – which can change once a ready replacement is appointed – is for Google Wallet and Google Pay coexistence in the United States. In the rest of the world, there will be one payment app, Wallet, which seems like a clean and reasonable offer. In the US and Singapore, though, Google doesn’t want to kill the new viral Google Pay app, so Google Wallet and Google Pay will be available. why? If Wallet is rolling out to the rest of the world, the token base obviously has the full set of payment features, why isn’t it rolling out everywhere?

Google is still looking for a vice president to replace Bill Ready, but the interim head of payments will be Nick Fox, longtime Google employee. It was Fox before front and center In the Google tech scene as Google’s head of messaging when the company produced Google Allo. Allo has been Google’s main messaging app since 2016-2018It lasts about 576 days on the market. Since Allo, Fox has been running Google Search.