What you need to know
- Google Pay in the UK is losing its P2P feature on September 6.
- P2P allows users to send and receive money from one another.
- The feature is only available in the UK and the U.S.
Last year, Google Pay received a major overhaul. Not only did it get a new name and UI upgrade, but the functions of Android Pay and Google Wallet were merged under the single Google Pay app — giving users one place to pay for things at stores using their phones and to send/receive money from one another.
Now, at least for folks in the United Kingdom, the latter of those two functions is going away.
Google sent out an email on June 14 titled "End of the Google Pay P2P service and important changes to your Google Payments service." In the email, it states:
We are announcing the end of Google Pay P2P, our peer-to-peer (P2P) payments service, in the United Kingdom. Starting from 6 September 2019, you'll no longer be able to send and request money through Google Pay's P2P service in Gmail or on pay.google.com.
If you have money in your Google Pay balance, Google recommends transferring it to your bank account. If you don't have a balance, you aren't required to do anything.
What makes this move even more interesting is that Google Pay's P2P feature was only ever available in the UK and the U.S. Google's yet to make a similar announcement for people in the States, but it does have us wondering if that'll happen with the UK one now making its way out the door.
The P2P feature on Google Pay works quite well and is something I use from time to time myself. Google hasn't provided a reason for why it's getting rid of the functionality, but it's entirely possible it just never caught on.
Should we learn more, we'll update this article.
