Google expanded its apparent pursuit of world domination this week by offering a credit card to small businesses in the United States and the United Kingdom.
The search giant has teamed with the Comenity Capital Group and Barclays to offer credit cards for small businesses that use AdWords to buy ads on the Adwords platform.
Business owners can now promote their businesses through the service and pay for it with the AdWords Business credit card, piloted last July to 1,400 small firms. According to Google’s research, 74 percent of the pilot participants said they would use the card as the primary form of payment for AdWords.
Interest rates for card users range from 8.99 percent to 18.99 percent depending on customer creditworthiness.
Could we be witnessing a trend? For its part, Amazon recently introduced Amazon Capital Services, a small lending program for small businesses who cannot easily access credit from larger institutions.Google is hawking phones, bargains, weddings and now small business solutions. From the looks of things, Google could quickly become the one-stop shop for your American Dream — if that even exists. Just last month, it rolled out its “Google For Entrepreneurs
” campaign, to promote its technology to small businesses.