Have you been waiting for your local bank to bring NFC tap-to-pay to their Android apps? If so, you might no longer have to wait for them. Overnight Google Australia announced that Android pay is coming to Australia in the first half of 2016. Google’s Australian managing director, Maile Carnegie told Ausdroid at the launch:
“Australians are some of the fastest adopters of technology in the world, including in their use of innovative banking solutions. It is wonderful to see wide support from the Australian banks and the industry for Android Pay, meaning you will be able to use your Android smartphone as a way to buy things when you’re out and about.”
At launch, Google has announced they are partnering with ANZ, Westpac, Bank of Melbourne, Bank of South Australia, Bendigo Bank, Cuscal, ING DIRECT, Macquarie Bank, and St. George. If your financial institution isn’t on that list Google stated they would continue to work with other partners throughout the year.
The partners selected by Google are clearly happy to be on board. Greg Ward, Deputy Managing Director, Macquarie Group told us:
“We are delighted to be working with Google to make Android Pay available to Macquarie transaction and credit cardholders. Macquarie is committed to providing our clients and partners with leading and innovative digital banking solutions, and Android Pay offers clients a simple and secure way to make payments using their Android phone, as well as the convenience of storing gift cards, loyalty cards and special offers on their phone for fast and easy access.”
If your bank isn’t on that list the perhaps it’s time you made your opinions known to them via their approved feedback mechanisms.
With Commonwealth Bank being one of the leading players in the current Android Tap to Pay space it is worth noting that they are conspicuously absent from the announcement post, time will tell if they are just a little late to the party or if they are not joining Android Pay in favour of their own in-house, and likely more profitable, solution. At launch in Australia Android pay will support MasterCard and Visa Credit and debit cards, with work continuing to enable eftpos (or standard debit cards) in the app.
Google also announced launch retail partners with 7-Eleven, Brumby’s Bakery, Coles Express, Coles Supermarkets, Crust Gourmet Pizza, Domino’s Pizza Enterprises Limited, Donut King, Gloria Jean’s Coffees, McDonald’s, Michel’s Patisserie, Pizza Capers, and Telstra all signing on to partner with Google on the launch.
Roger Sniezek, Coles’ financial services director, told Ausdroid:
“Coles has been a pioneer in mobile payments and a key supporter of contactless technologies for a number of years. We welcome new, innovative technologies and look forward to Google launching Android Pay in Australia and accepting it at all Coles locations”
It is important to note that Android pay will work where ever you can use contactless payments so these are more likely promotional partners rather than exclusive payment merchants.
But wait there’s more, one of the features of Android pay includes in-app purchases, Google has announced partnerships with Australian app developers to bring Android Pay integration into their apps, the apps include Day, EatNow, GoCatch, Kogan.com, Menulog, OzSale, Rewardle, and The Iconic.
Are you a developer who wants to add Android Pay to your app? Google also outlined the 3rd party payment providers who they are partnering with to provide app developers with an end to end payment solutions. Developers can choose between Braintree, eWAY, First Data, and Stripe to integrate payments solutions including Android Pay into their apps.
Australia isn’t new to the tap-to-pay experience so it is easy to see that adoption of Android Pay could be quite large, and with many major players in the Australian financial market getting involved there will be many existing customers of those services who can use the service and plenty of choice for those of us who might be considering a new bank soon.
Are you excited for Android Payments to come to Australia? If your bank doesn’t sign up; will that be enough to make you change banks?
I’m happy that Bank of Melbourne is on the list. Their mobile banking app is pretty trash and there’s never been any hints about Android Pay or some kind of NFC based tap payment feature. Hope this is rolled out ASAP, would go awesome with my Nexus 5X.
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what’s the privacy policies on Android Pay? All I can find is this: payments dot google dot com/legaldocument?family=0.privacynotice which may or may not be related from the link: Transaction information – When you use Google Payments to conduct a transaction, we may collect information about the transaction, including: Date, time and amount of the transaction, the merchant’s location and description, a description provided by the seller of the goods or services purchased, any photo you choose to associate with the transaction, the names and email addresses of the seller and buyer (or sender and recipient), the type of payment method… Read more »
What privacy? Every time you use your FlyBuys and fuel dockets, they do data mining on your shopping items, shopping behavior, date/time you shop, etc so that they may do target advertisement on the pages you visit.
And with Android Pay you are handing over quite an important data set to one company that already has so much of our data. It’s not just advertisement they want all your data for.
How would they relate my browser to purchases made in person? Honest question
So now Alphabet/Google want to know what we are spending our money on! hhmm yeah they are not going to use that data for anything are they.
OHHHH YESSSS!!!
Amazing announcement, thanks for the earlier Christmas pressie Google AU.
April 1st is my pick on when they launch… just to really mess with us!
Cool, looking forward to this. So to verify, your phone must be on 4.4 and above to use this function?
according to the playstore listing in the US, “Install Android Pay on any NFC-enabled Android device (KitKat 4.4+)”
Glad to see that ANZ is on the list and hope we can use it in Woolies too
excited but I’ll use when it’s actually available. in any case, my 6s+ (which I can use now if I choose to) and my G3 are ready
Google should really implement Android Pay on Android Wear, but anyway it’s nice to see progress for mobile payments in Australia.
I’d love this, unfortunately NFC isn’t supported in AW and to my knowledge only the Sony SW3 had an NFC chip (again from memory it was for accessory pairing), perhaps in the Gen 3 hardware we may see it arrive, fingers crossed.
Jeez, that would be sweet on my Moto 360.
Great news. Hopefully they’ll be able to get AmEx support too, but visa and mastercard are a good start.
Glad to see St George on the list. FINALLY it’s coming to Australia – looking forward!
Not surprised to see ING on there. From what I have seen apart from a credit card with credit and points etc why would you bank anywhere else. I don’t trust the big banks and their fees are huge plus you are locked into using their ATMs or pay a fee. So with this I can use any ATM and ING pays the fee and I can use Android Pay for the CC transactions. Brilliant.
I was considering opening a bank account with CommBank but now Android Pay is coming and there’s no support just yet, I’m a bit sceptical of CommBank’s tap & pay future. It’s very exciting that Android Pay is coming, but for fingerprint support, I’ll have to wait Q1 2015 or even later to receive Android Marshmallow on the Galaxy S5.
I’m an existing CommBank customer and I’m already comparing new credit card options
Why I wonder? I think the CBA solution works just fine, and won’t be surprised if they work with Google next year on integration with Android Pay.
1. I like to play with the new hotness
2. I actually doubt CBA will integrate with AP unless they assess it will hurt their business (google will be wanting a cut at some stage), CBA is a leader in this space if they wanted to be on board they would be.
3. Whilst I love the CBA tap to pay its app isn’t as deeply integrated into the device, with AP you don’t need to launch the app just unlock the phone and tap, and the CBA app doesn’t offer the app intergration of AP.
That’s awesome! Users who have Android 4.4+ (majority of users) will be able to use it. Now just need CommBank and NAB on board
hell yes, finally
So if I have a visa card from a non supported bank, will it work or not?
Very excited by this. Anything to make my wallet smaller…
I would say no, sorry.
I have Westpac and NAB cards. Pity NAB is not supported 🙁
No, with android pay the card needs to be verified by your bank, so if they’re not on the list you can’t add it
This just blows my mind, here I was thinking android pay will never get here or at least be years away.
Nice to see
No love for Safeway and CBA 🙁
It will work at safeway if they have tap to pay terminals they’re just not a “paetner” as for CBA call their phone support number and let your feeling be heard.
I changed to CBA at the beginning of 2015 for the NFC payments. While I don’t use it every time, it is pretty handy sometimes. Mind you, their online banking and clever features like cashless ATM withdrawals make it a good choice anyway.
Woot. I can’t wait. But as NAB continues to drag their heels I get more and more frustrated. I’ll let them know that it’s now getting embarrassing…