You may be familiar with Apple Pay, but one of Apple’s biggest competitors, that is Google’s Android, is now launching Android Pay to its Canadian customers.

Android Pay works the same way as Apple Pay, in that it uses a secure tokenized system that syncs your Visa or MasterCard credit card or debit card with Android Pay so that you can pay for things with the ‘tap’ of your phone. This will work on terminals that advertise having the Near Field Communication supported technology, and it will keep your credit card and debit card numbers protected from the merchants, as all they will see, says Google, is the total price of your purchase and the specific financial institution you will be paying with.

The financial institutions covered with this new technology for us Canadians will be:

• Canadian MasterCard and Visa cards
• Interac debit cards:
  • Bank of Montreal
  • CIBC
  • Banque Nationale
  • Scotiabank
  • Desjardins
  • President’s Choice Financial
  • ATB Financial
  • and Canadian Tire Financial Services

The biggest difference between Apple Pay and Android’s version is that instead of the encrypted financial and tokenized information being stored on a separate chip, as it is in Apple’s permutation, Google will store your information on the cloud. Google takes security very seriously and wants to assure anyone who is having doubts about having this information stored on the cloud that in Google they can trust, said Pali Bhat, the vice president of product payments at Google.

Click here to learn more about the release of Android Pay in Canada.