Google payment app 'Tez ; launched : Important Highlights

Google payment app 'Tez' launched : Important Highlights
❆
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has launched Internet giant Google's free mobile wallet and payments app titled 'Tez' in India. Tez app will let users link up their phones to their bank accounts to pay for goods securely in physical stores and online.

Available for both Android and iOS users, the app also allows person-to-person money transfers with a new technology called Audio QR, which uses ultrasonic sounds to let you exchange money, bypassing any need for NFC.

Tez is Google’s play to replace cash transactions and become a more central part of how people pay for things, using their mobile to do so. But it’s also a chance for the company to push out some new technologies — like audio QR (AQR), which lets users transfer money by letting their phones speak to each other with sounds — to see how it can make that process more frictionless, and therefore more attractive to use than cash itself. More on AQR below.

Google linking up with several major banks in the country like Axis, HDFC Bank, ICICI, and State Bank of India (SBI), by way of UPI (Unified Payments Interface) — a payment standard and system backed by the government in its push to bring more integrated banking services into a very fragmented market. There will also be phones coming to the market from Lava, Micromax, Nokia and Panasonic with Tez preloaded, the company said.

Note : Tez is not a mobile “wallet” in the same way as PayTM offers a mobile wallet, where money is stored in the app and needs to be topped up to be used; it’s more like Apple’s Wallet or other mobile wallets in the west: a place that links up your phone with your bank accounts to let you use your phone as a way to deduct payments from those accounts.

With this, Google become latest international giant to enter into India’s fast growing digital payment ecosystem. Google has announced that the app will 'understand' eight Indian languages and will work with 55 banks.