Google Pay won’t be getting those Plex accounts after all
Google’s plans last year to build a branded banking service may never actually pan out. According to The Wall Street Journal, Google’s giving up on “Plex,” its multiple-bank approach for integrating financial services more directly inside the redesigned Google Pay. The company was working with several partner banks to offer accounts certain standardized feature sets and deep integration into services like Pay, paired with other customer-centric features like no overdraft or monthly fees. However, no actual release date was ever set for Plex, and the project has reportedly been abandoned.
Citing the usual “people familiar with the matter,” explanations for Plex’s downfall apparently include the loss of payments executive Caesar Sengupta, who was heavily involved in it. But even outside the executive level, the Google Pay team has apparently been having a pretty rough few months, with even lower-level employees fleeing the division after last year’s reimagination of the app and service didn’t have the expected impression or customer adoption.
We actually liked the redesigned service when we tried it last year, and new features like email and Google Photos receipt scanning were both unique and pretty handy. However, Google Pay remains a small player in the larger contactless payments space. One study last year by Pulse Network (part of Discover card) claimed it accounted for a mere 3% of the market.
Plex was intended to build on the overall experience by offering deeper banking integration than the existing Plaid service provided, including benefits like the ability to silo money for specific goals and set spending and deposit alerts, all with no fees for overdrafts or monthly service. Since the announcement last year, Plex has been on waitlist access through partners like Citi and Stanford FCU.
Google had planned to offer Plex accounts through at least nine partner banks at one point, and according to the Wall Street Journal, some of them were unaware that the project had been canceled. Many of the banks participating in the program were on the smaller side, and some, like Citigroup, were reportedly excited for the prospect and had around 400,000 people waitlisted to try it. Unfortunately for them, it looks like Plex isn’t happening after all.
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