Google to Start Issuing Checking Account to Customers Next Year

• Google to Start Issuing Checking Account to Customers Next Year

Google Inc, the world’s largest search engine, will start offering checking account to customers by next year, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.

The checking accounts under a project called Cache will be issued by Citigroup Inc and the Stanford Federal Credit Union, the report stated.

“Our approach is going to be to partner deeply with banks and the financial system,” stated Caesar Sengupta, general manager and vice-president of payments at Google.

“It may be the slightly longer path, but it’s more sustainable,” Sengupta was quoted as saying in the report.

Google will join the likes of Apple and Facebook in the Financial Technology space.

However, experts are worried that tech giants entering the financial system without experience amid rising data breach may disrupt and hurt central banks’ function of regulating the financial system given their data reach.

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., a leading voice on tech companies, said “I’m concerned when we got, whether it’s libra or the Google proposal, … these giant tech platforms entering into new fields before there are some regulatory rules of the road.”

“Because once they get in, the ability to extract them out is going to be virtually impossible,” said Warner.