Indian Google Pay users will now be able to add debit and credit cards to the payments application, the company announced in an event in Delhi today. The application so far allowed UPI-based payments from your bank accounts only.

The company explained that for debit and credit cards, Google Pay uses a technology called tokenisation. In this, the application uses a digital token to authenticate your card instead of passing the actual card number to a vendor or merchant.

Tokenised cards will be rolling out on Google Pay in the next few weeks, the company said in its keynote. At the moment, it supports only Visa cards from Axis Bank, HDFC, Standard Chartered Bank and State Bank of India, but it will also be adding support for Mastercard and RuPay soon, thereby adding more banks to the platform.

Further, Google also announced a new Spots platform for Google Pay. This allows merchants and companies to create physical QR-Code and NFC-based payments cards for offline payments. With these, merchants can build customisable experiences on Google Pay, so a retail store can add its entire catalogue, while MakeMyTrip can allow ticket bookings directly through Google Pay.

Google also announced Google Pay for Business on Wednesday, which is meant for merchants and businesses. This will be a separate app that lets merchants verify themselves via a phone call and submit documents online, and use Google Pay for payments.

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