Google reportedly eyeing PSD2 opportunities

Google is actively working with a number of European banks to explore opportunities arising from PSD2, according to a report in The Irish Times.

Details are scant, but this week Florence Diss, Google’s head of commerce partnerships for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, discussed Google’s interest in establishing new collaborative relationships with banks, in an interview the publication conducted during this week’s Finovate conference in London.

PSD2 requires banks to make customer data available to share with other organizations, typically through application programming interfaces, and Google this week demonstrated a new API it worked on with KBC Bank Ireland. The feature enables consumers to open a bank account in less than five minutes using a selfie taken with a smartphone as identification, the Irish Times reported.

Google, which works with 1,000 banks in 18 global markets, also is interested in exploring business-to-business payment opportunities, although the article did not go into specifics.

Google on Feb. 20 rolled out its rebranded Google Pay mobile payments service in the U.S. and the U.K., and within the next two months it will migrate the existing person-to-person payments feature currently called Google Pay Send into the app.