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Google announced a pilot app program Wednesday that aims to make it more seamless to use its Android Pay payments app. The new app, called Hands Free, will remove the need to use a smartphone at checkout, when shopping at merchants participating in the pilot — which for now is limited to a southern portion of the San Francisco Bay Area. With Hands Free, shoppers at checkout tell cashiers that they want to “pay with Google.” Checkout computers, equipped with the Android Pay app, then let cashiers call up a photo that the shopper already has uploaded to the app, to verify the shopper’s identity, and then complete the transaction. In select stores, Google is testing the use of in-store cameras to automatically confirm a shopper’s identity, based on the uploaded picture. Google is a subsidiary of Alphabet ( GOOGL ). The announcement signals Google’s growing interest in the crowded payments sectors . It’s a complex and competitive arena, with companies in the mix including Apple ( AAPL ) with Apple Pay; PayPal ( PYPL ) which recently split off from eBay ( EBAY ); and recent IPO Square ( SQ ). If Hands Free indeed signals that Google plans to aggressively tackle online payments, it could spell trouble for PayPal, according to Alex Rampell, a general partner at the noted venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. PayPal executives stick to their message that the San Jose, Calif.-based company is well-positioned, in part because unlike Google or Apple, it’s platform agnostic. For example, PayPal processes many of the transactions conducted over Apple Pay. On Monday, San Francisco-based Square announced that it was adding the ability to store money on its Square Cash app, adding a feature already offered by PayPal and PayPal subsidiary Venmo. Venmo and Square Cash are peer-to-peer payments apps that are popular with millennials, which use them for things such as sharing the cost of a cab fare or meal. At least one analyst says Venmo stacks up well against rivals such as Google and Apple. Amazon.com ( AMZN ) is also in the payments business — and that’s the reason, according to industry watchers, that Amazon shoppers will not be able to pay with PayPal at any time in the near future. When PayPal spun off from eBay, executives said at the time that one advantage was the new business opportunities it couldn’t get while attached to eBay. Scalper1 News
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