Payhawk integrates Google Pay for more secure and convenient transactions

By Gaia Lamperti

Payments and expense management platform Payhawk announced today a direct integration with digital wallet platform Google Pay which will facilitate instant transactions without sharing sensitive data.

Thanks to the integration of Google Pay, Payhawk’s users will be able to use a token in place of their actual credit or debit card number, a process called ‘tokenization’. The feature will specifically benefit employees working remotely or on the go, allowing them to make payments online and at POS terminals with their everyday devices and without the need to input card details.

Payhawk is a London-headquartered growing platform that combines expense management, payments and invoice management in one solution, working as a one-stop-shop for finance teams. It also provides commercial Visa debit cards for employees with built-in spend rules and collection of receipts, and automatically reconciles and extracts data from invoices in more than 60 languages.

Last year, the firm announced the release of a special NextGen card to encourage finance teams to implement spend rules directly on company cards based on locations, budgets, merchants or days and times when cards can be used.

The new Google Pay integration will help to make transactions on behalf of an employer both more secure and convenient for its customer base, which includes a mix of fast-growing and mature multinational companies like LuxAir, Lotto24, Holded, Nexo, MacPaw and By Miles.

“We want to build a world-class infrastructure to protect your company’s money, where payments are seamless,” CEO and Founder of Payhawk, Hristo Borisov said. “The integration with Google Pay represents a step forward for our platform, in both convenience and the security of a company’s sensitive financial data.”

To make a purchase, customers will have to install the Google Pay app and simply tap their devices on a point-of-sale terminal or choose to pay in the mobile app. Google Pay will provide a tokenized card and a cryptogram, which acts as a single-use password, that the card network will validate, matching the token with the customer’s actual card number.

In April, the company raised $20 million in a funding round led by the US-based fund QED Investors, which also backs buy-now-pay-later app Klarna. Recently, Payhawk announced the launch of one-click bill payments and reimbursements powered by a partnership with Railsbank. The platform also joins the Xero App Marketplace with a live bank feed to fully automate the reconciliation of all company payments.