After weeks of speculations and rumours, Google has finally launched it’s first mobile wallet and payments app, Tez in India. This is their first big move into mobile payment in Asia.
Tez will allow users to carry out person to person money transfers and securely pay for products they purchase from various offline and online stores by linking up phones to their bank accounts.
Google has collaborated with various popular banks in the country including HDFC bank, Axis, ICICI and State Bank of India by way of UPI (Unified Payments Interface). UPI is a reliable and a standard payment system backed by the government of India.
Tez is not actually a mobile wallet. Mobile wallets like PayTm store your money in the app and requires to be topped up when needed to be used. However, Tez is more like Apple wallet that links up your phone to your bank accounts and allows you to use your phone as a way to make payments by deducting the amount from those accounts.
The app is available in all majorly spoken languages like English, Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, and Telugu. Their online payment partners include food giants like Dominos and transport services like Jet Airways and RedBus. Tez does not allow you to perform more than 20 transactions in a day. Also, for money transfers, there is a limit of ₹1,00,000 in a single day across all UPI applications.
Google is also planning to launch the service in other Asian countries like Indonesia and Philippines soon. India, the second most populous Asian country is one of the most favourable markets mobile payment services. India has a rapidly expanding middle class population which has a tech-focused approach. However, at the same time, India has a low credit card penetration and transaction are mainly carried out via cash. So, even though the conditions are favourable, it is still a challenging market.
They have also introduced a seperate business portal that will help various online companies to accept Tez payments by integrating as sellers.
Google believes that developing countries like India would help digital payments ecosystem to flourish better than that of developed markets like US where people already use cards for making payments. The Digital Payments ecosystem is expected to reach a volume of $500 billion annually by the year 2020.
Tez is currently available for Android as well as iOS