UPDATE: I’ve improperly credited Mr. Parikh to work at 9to5Google when in fact he’s employed at Android Police. The article has been altered to reflect this change.
Prasham Parikh of Android Police has encountered a new feature in his version of the redesigned Google Pay app – a spending habits overview for the end of the year. Unfortunately, it’s only starting to roll out to some users in India – not yet to the U.S. or U.K. Being that we’re only a few days away from the new year, a personalized overview may come to your Pay app shortly thereafter.
In the photos uploaded by Prasham, we can see a handful of useful statistics that will be presented to a user including how much they’ve contributed to local businesses (something Google is big on), their top spending categories, how many friends they’ve interacted with, including how many transactions they’ve completed between them and even a monthly spending trends chart that spans all twelve months of the year in one view. In total, there are 16 screens that you can swipe through, but this may vary based on your spending habits, we’re guessing.
The new Google Pay already shows you how much you’ve spent ‘last weekend’ and so on, continually providing timely and useful ‘heads up’ information at the top of its Insights tab. It’s a useful approach that seeks to simplify our relationship with money ahead of Google’s Plex Account rollout which will give a lot more of this sort of data in a personalized dashboard next year.
Prasham says that there is no indication that Google will roll this out to other users, but the entire conceptualization of the redesigned app and all of its functionality was born out of its success in India, to begin with, so it’s likely that anything we see done there will come to the rest of us if it proves to be useful – and an overview like this definitely seems to be more than just a novelty. Instead, it can be a powerful wake-up call to those of us (me) who spend entirely too much at places like Starbucks.
Seeing everything in one place can help to add shock value to spending habits and assist with New Year’s resolutions – at least, that’s my hope. You can already sort of do this type of research using the built-in Search bar at the top of the app, but this overview does all of the work for you. If you receive this feature and you’re outside of India, let us know in the comments!
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.