Google Tez has become the latest UPI-based payments app in the country, propelling the Internet search giant into the league of companies eyeing a piece of India’s digital payments pie. The new Google Tez app can be used to pay for movie tickets, utility bills, and make other transactions online. The company will hold a launch event for the app on Monday in New Delhi, but has made it official ahead of that. Tez means fast in Hindi, which the company said was one of the selling points of its new app. Google’s rivals such as Amazon and Facebook are also making efforts to tap the country’s digital payments market.
Google Tez is a standalone payments app, available on Android and iOS, and is powered by UPI, a payments protocol built by government-backed organisation NPCI. The launch of Google Tez comes nine months after the company chief executive officer Sundar Pichai told NDTV in a televised interview that he was looking at UPI and ways to adopt it.
“The app weighs just 7MB on Android and works with the vast majority of Android smartphones in the country,” Caesar Sengupta, the head of Google’s Next Billion programme said onstage at the event. The app even works on Android KitKat-powered smartphones, Sengupta said. iPhone users — going as back as iPhone 4s — will be able to use Tez app as well, he added.
How Google Tez works
The Google Tez UPI-enabled digital payments app supports various local languages including Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu. The interface is straightforward, and strikingly different from other payments apps, Google executives said onstage at the event. “This was deliberate. We wanted to make digital payments as simple as paying via cash,” executives said. The company asks users to enter their bank account number and verify their ownership. They can do so easily by quickly sending a text message from their registered phone number through the Google Tez app’s interface. Once verified, Google prompts the user to add a UPI PIN, and then they can start making payments. They can then see all their friends who’re also using Tez, and request and pay money.
More interesting, however, is the Google Tez “Cash mode” option, which transmits “audio” using Google’s QR technology to identify the person nearby you, and lets you pay or receive money when you’re able to find that user. “It works on almost all phones sold in India,” a Google executive said at the event. The company has partnered with Axis, HDFC Bank, ICICI, and State Bank of India for backend processing. “With Cash Mode, we have made paying digitally as easy as paying via cash,” a Google executive said.
Google Tez supports various Indian languages, such as Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu with more coming soon. Google has partnered with several popular services to boost its usage. Bus ticketing service RedBus, PVR Cinemas, Domino’s Pizza, DishTV and Jet Airways are launch partners, it said on the website. The company suggests users to have look out for Google Tez logo in their favourite services to see whether it is supported. The company has also introduced “Tez Scratch Cards”, and from the description it appears it will be offering customers deals and vouchers through this *feature to attract them, incentivising use and adoption of the platform.
For the first time you exchange money with a friend who is also using Tez app, you both receive a scratch card from the company. These scratch cards contain an unspecified amount of money in them. It could be anything from Re. 1 to Rs. 1,000. To avail these scratch cards, however, you have to ensure that you’re paying – or receiving – an amount that is either Rs. 50 or more than that. Google said at the event that it will keep this incentive programme active at least till the end of the year, but the app showed the last date of the ‘offer’ to be April 1, 2018.
Google notes that a user can only avail 10 scratch cards at most in a week, and each sender-recipient pair will earn one reward each per week. You can earn a maximum of 10 rewards per week, up to a total of Rs. 9,000 per financial year. There are two types of Google Tez Scratch Cards. The blue ones are awarded to both sender and recipient, while the red ‘Lucky Sundays’ one is awarded to the sender only once per week. This red Google Tez Scratch Card is locked until the Sunday, and users will be able to scratch it for a change to win up to Rs. 1 lakh (at the time of writing).
Also, the company has a referral program and it is giving customers the ability to invite their friends. Those who join from the invitation they received from a friend will get Rs. 51 after signing up. The friend who sent the invitation will also get Rs. 51.
