"Tez" Google’s new payment app for India that uses Audio QR to transfer money

After several weeks of speculation and leaked details, today Google officially unveiled its first big foray into mobile payments in Asia. Google has introduced a new payment app in India called Tez (the Hindi word for “fast”). Tez features a technology called audio QR that allows users to transfer money using sounds to pair two devices.

“Send money home to your family, split a dinner bill with friends, or pay the neighbourhood chaiwala. Make all payments big or small, directly from your bank account with Tez, Google’s new digital payment app for India,” Google notes in its information portal about the new app.

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.

There are 300 million smartphone users in India, and phones with NFC are still relatively rare and expensive, with many users instead favoring entry-level and mid-tier devices. Tez is a step beyond Android Pay, because it allows users to link payment apps from Indian banks — it works with all of the country’s 55 banks on India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI). UPI is a system that allows numerous bank accounts to be linked into one mobile app, and enables secure peer-to-peer payment. According to Bloomberg, digital transactions have surged after the Indian Government banned high-value cash notes late last year.

Tez has already gone live on Google’s Play Store, and Apple’s App Store on iOS as well. Google’s Tez is based on UPI platform, which stands for United Payments Interface and has been made by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI). UPI allows for easy transfer for payments within bank accounts. With UPI, a user can just rely on the mobile number of the VPA (Virtual Payment Address) to make a payment straight to the bank account, rather than requiring the full bank account number, IFSC code, etc as is needed in most cases.

Download here
Google Play Store Click Here
Apple Store Click Here