Report: Google is planning to offer checking accounts to users, in partnership with banks and credit unions, starting as early as next year
Google is the latest big tech company to make a move into banking and personal financial services: The company is gearing up to offer checking accounts to consumers … Source: Wall Street Journal .
TechCrunchDarrell Etherington
Context & Ripple Effects
This report lands on top of a decade of half-steps in Google's payments stack: a Gmail-and-Inbox bill-payment project back in 2015 and Google Wallet's automatic bank transfers the following year. Checking accounts are the escalation — instead of moving money between apps, Google would hold the account itself, with banks and credit unions supplying the charter.
Partner banks and credit unions gain a distribution channel to deposit customers they could never reach on their own, while Google gets balances and transaction data flowing through Google Pay without needing a bank charter.
Consumers get a checking product embedded in an app they already use daily, shifting their primary financial relationship's interface from the bank to Google.
Second-order effects
Banks accepting the partnership trade away the front-end customer relationship: Google owns the app, the data, and the brand touchpoint, reducing partners to licensed balance sheets — a trade-off the Citi debit card deal doubles down on.
Every other consumer app with a payments surface faces pressure to answer with its own embedded-account play, since deposits are the stickiest signal of daily-user engagement a platform can capture.
Third-order effects
If the model holds, banking splits structurally into regulated institutions holding deposits and tech platforms owning the interface — but the Plex shutdown shows the reverse risk: when the platform sponsor loses internal backing, partner banks are left with integrations built around a product that no longer exists.
The episode argues that big-tech banking ventures live or die on executive sponsorship rather than regulatory or demand constraints, making banks wary of building distribution strategies on top of another company's strategic experiment.
The trend: Consumer banking is being pulled toward a platform-plus-charter structure where tech companies own the interface and banks own the license — a structure whose stability depends on the platform's own commitment, as Google's later retreat from Plex demonstrated.
Banks are bad enough. I find it hard to believe anyone would open a checking account with a data theft company like @Google. To quote the very smart @benthompson on this new Google checking plan: “It is difficult...to think of a rationale for this effort that is not about data.” …
genuinely believe most decisions made by the 4-5 bigtech companies boil down to some version of: “is my competitor going to do this if I don't do it first,” no matter how unnecessary the product https://twitter.com/...
Google will know people's - email content and correspondents - search history - android location history and app usage - household temperature and now - purchase behavior I'm sure that's fine 🙃 https://twitter.com/...
“Google, however, has been quick to claim that it won't sell checking account financial data to advertisers, and it added that it doesn't currently use Google Pay data for advertising purposes”, pipeline: “won't use data” 🔜 “doesn't currently” 🔜 “does” https://www.theverge.com/..…
“Hey Google, what's my balance?” The tech giant is getting into the banking business. https://www.wsj.com/... via @WSJ cool, so you can buy back your own health data from them with a debit card!
“Our approach is going to be to partner deeply with #banks and the #financial system. It may be the slightly longer path, but it's more sustainable.” @caesars @google cache vs. @facebook @Libra_ @citi vs. @mastercard who would win? one brave $link https://www.wsj.com/...
Google enters banking in the US with planned checking accounts via Citi/Stanford Credit Union. They will need a “hook” to get consumers to switch - probably more than: “Hey Google, what's my balance?” Any hypothesis? https://www.wsj.com/...
Google — and the FAANGs, in general — are just trying to keep pace with @alipay, which now has more than 870 million users https://techcrunch.com/... @techmeme