Google Pay Can Bring New Stamp Rewards In 2020; Stories Feature For Merchants Can Be Introduced

India’s Google Pay is a rebrand of the formerly known Google Tez, and this app has gone through a lot of functionality changes and addition of new functionalities after the rebranding. 

What Is This New Offer?

Last time Google Pay (Tez) was spotted in preparing to add gold gifting options for its users in India. 

According to sources, this app is preparing to bring stamp rewards for 2020 – One-Time Mandates, and stories for merchants.

As per the findings from APK, Google Pay (Tez) 49.0.003_RC05 contains new strings that, indicate that Google is working on some new features.

An APK teardown can mostly predict the new features that may arrive in a future update of an application, but there is a possibility that any of the features mentioned here may not make it in a future release.

What Are Google Pay 2020 Stamp Rewards?

Google’s Diwali stamp rewards campaign during the recent festive season in India has become a big hit. 

Google did not reveal any metrics for this campaign, but it’s not hidden that this campaign did help Google Pay to become a preferred payment method, if only for the campaign period.

Now, it seems that Google is planning to recreate some of that same success again with the arrival of New Year.

 According to these new strings found indicates a similar campaign in the works for 2020. 

It is expected that the 2020 campaign is likely to involve the camera and the microphone as two means to earn stamps. 

The information that users will have to leverage their phone’s microphone to listen to a Google Pay ad on TV or Google India’s YouTube playlist. 

Afterworld the audio scanner will attempt to pick up the number “2020” within the ad audio and reward users with a 2020-themed stamp.

Apart from this some older strings also had their descriptions changed that indicate that simply scanning the number 2020 will also earn you a stamp and some will be tricky like earlier.

As there is still some time to go for 2020, so we have to wait to hear more about the rewards and other finer details for the campaign.

What Are Stories for Merchants?

This new version of Google Pay is also prepping to allow merchants to add stories.

The question arises, why would we need stories within Google Pay? We can only speculate. 

Recently, Google did add private messaging to Google Photos, so why not go ahead add stories within Google Pay too. 

It is also a guess that “story” within this context refers to the temporary photo and video highlights that social media sites have incorporated on their platforms.

What Are One-Time Mandates?

As per the news, One-Time Mandates are part of the UPI 2.0 feature rollout. By using feature, users can pre-authorize a transaction and block funds in their account with an intention to have them debited later. 

The blocking will ensure that you have sufficient funds in your account till the transaction needs to be executed and that you continue earning interest on the amount, as well as allows the transaction to be scheduled and executed automatically.

Since the results have a combination of both older and newer strings, it can not be assured that the feature is new and does not already exist for some users. (Reference)

The main preference title was just added, so it is assumed that the feature is not live yet.