Google Pay to Now Send SMS Alerts To Help Users Transact Securely

To help users easily identify any suspicious transactions, Google Pay will now send app notifications as well as SMS to inform users each time they receive a collect request to highlight that approving the request will deduct money from their bank accounts, Google on Wednesday announced. The company said that the additional notification will go live today in India.

"We are mindful that at Google Pay, users are entrusting us with their most sensitive asset - their money. We are conscious of the responsibility that comes with this trust," Ambarish Kenghe, Director, Product Management, Google Pay said in a blog post on Wednesday.

"The above security features, and a lot more ongoing work in this direction, are a small example of how we keep our users safe," Kenghe said.

In the last two years, instant bank-to-bank transfers via Unified Payments Interface (UPI) have become the preferred form of payment for millions of Indians, with many users adopting digital payments for the first time.

Google Pay comes equipped with several of Google's security infrastructure including scam protections, the company noted in the blog post.

It uses Machine Learning-based scam prevention models, and also displays explicit "scam" or "stranger" warnings if a user receives a request from someone suspicious or not in their contacts, Google said.

Apart from the scam prevention, some of the already available security features in Google Pay are secure access via PIN, exhaustive risk relations check to block fraudsters, and prominent warnings during collect requests.

Written with inputs from IANS