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Google debuts Tez, a mobile payments app for India
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- uji 9y agoThis is certainly good for India. I predict, over time, cash-less transactions in India will increase, as more companies start investing in cashless transactions.
- Alterlife 9y agoThis good for Google. India is already going cashless. There are plenty of wallets and chash-less apps spending money trying to buy market share. Every vendor and their younger brouther has their own wallet app. You'd be hard pressed to find a shop without a paytm or phonepe or whatever barcode at the window. It's already happening. Google is trying to ride the wave, and the government is trying to ride the Google PR wave!
- avip 9y agoMore companies? There are like 50 different apps for passing money around in India. Not to include Uber and Ola. The issue to be settled is onboarding merchants and fighting regulations.
- akjdhfdf3723 9y ago> English, Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, and Telugu. In all my years of living in India, I've not come across one person using anything other than English. Most people, even in IT, hadn't the slightest clue about how to type their own language into a PC. Didn't stop them from being "proud" of <insert object> though.
- dingo_bat 9y agoI see a lot of Uber drivers using Kannada for the entire phone here in Bangalore. Usage may be more than what is visible to us.
- namanyayg 9y agoI've seen Uber drivers use Uber and Google Maps in Hindi, and I assume it would be the same in other regions for their regional languages. These things exist because there's a market for it.
- srisa 9y agoI have not seen or used the app. Having the labels in non-English languages can be very helpful. Typing vernacular languages on keyboard with just English alphabet is complicated to say the least.
- avip 9y agoNot sure what echo chamber you live in. Many people in India don't speak, read or write English. Most of them carry and use mobile phones. Why would you exclude them from using the app?
- balladeer 9y agoThat comment is either just a low effort troll attempt or made by someone not at all familiar with India and definitely not familiar with her linguistic diversity. Or maybe someone with extremely limited existence in one of this country's many urban bubbles. In fact had Google launched the app only in English or English+Hindi I would have been really surprised because they would been losing on the clear majority of India - the rural India, 2nd tier cities, and town and below. Internet is exploding there, clearly engendered by Reliance Jio and other operators following close and in panic. Also, the way Govt went all guerrilla on demonetisation (nationwide) and the way Govt is pushing digital money the larger population, who are not at all proficient in English, will have to come on board the digital payment system (and in my humble opinion will have to suffer a lot because planning and infra neither are well prepared; but that's another matter) and for the inclusion of regional languages are not a smart move per se, but a must.
- someonenice 9y agoI myself am one who type using Google Indic keyword for typing local. In all my local whatsapp group majority of the conversations are in local language.
- halflings 9y agoMight be good enough for somebody launching an app under a restricted budget, but Google usually tries to support all local languages, even rare ones, and Bengali is definitely not a rare language to use. GBoard also makes it much easier to write Indic languages (transliteration from Latin etc)
- train_robber 9y agoBeing an app developer here; the reality can't be further than this. From our figures atleast 30% of our base use it in their vernacular. English is only a good start; if you really need to penetrate the masses - localization is a must.
- pvsukale3 9y agoI live in India. Many people have launched UPI based payment apps. Even government launched an app called BHIM. It is really good. UPI is a really good concept. The problem: None of these apps is used by most of the vendors in cities. Except for Paytm which is available with many small vendors in cities. They used the demonetization period to heavily market the app by going vendor to vendor singing them up.BHIM is really good but government needs to work on its marketing. They can use college/school students everywhere to do the same. JIO has granted access to fast mobile networks to common people. We need to teach people how to use these apps.
- kamaal 9y ago>>Except for Paytm which is available with many small vendors in cities. No. I live in Bangalore and 'many' small vendors don't accept Paytm. They did it momentarily as a last ditch effort to not see their business crash. Cash has come back like no tomorrow. Also you don't have to teach people anything, or provide any amount of free internet plans. If they are smart enough to use WhatsApp and while away time on the internet to do unproductive stuff they can also use payment apps. The reason why don't use it because they want to cheat on taxes. That is the issue. And its social and cultural in nature. Its not a technology related problem.
- eklavya 9y agoThis is spot on. The resistance to online payments and the newly introduced GST is not technical/financial it's because they don't want to pay taxes.
- captn3m0 9y agoUPI is a private payment instrument. It has nothing to do with the Government. (BHIM is not a government app either, despite our PM promoting it)
- fooker 9y agoYou have an interesting definition of 'private'. http://www.npci.org.in/ http://www.npci.org.in/ Maybe diversify the sources you get your news from?
- prkvs 9y agoNot even a day and see the number of negative comments on the playstore.
- the_common_man 9y agoI read your comment and checked the app page. (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.nbu.paisa.user https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...) It had 4.5 stars. I was like what is this commenter talking about. I then dig into the comments and there are a massive number of negative comments. I am not sure what is happening here but the rating seems artificially inflated. It shows that there are only 9 1-stars and yet in comments there are way more 1-stars. Really sad to see this sort of gaming at the play store level.
- lurker- 9y agoI don't know how the Play Store commenting system works, but I think before jumping to conclusions then it's important to consider that if there were any foul play then it would probably have been better achieved through "shadowbanning". I do feel it would make sense if the Play Store didn't count comments made by newly registered users or known bots.
- halflings 9y agoLet's not assume Google just decided to break the trust of billions of users just to inflate the ratings of one of their apps. Many possible explanations: different caching, some of the 1 star comments were by people who didn't use the app, bots, etc.
- Oletros 9y agoRight now I see 3.2 stars and doing the calc with the votes it is right
- balladeer 9y agoI install (iOS) and started the app, tried to verify OTP sent on SMS 7 times and it failed to verify every single time saying OTP is incorrect. Colleagues around me faced the same issue. They all gave up and I also quietly uninstalled the app. So maybe that's that.
- lapgrjigwvjjz 9y agoPS : It's pronounced like 'Taze' but with a soft T. It means 'quick' :)
- tacomonstrous 9y agoFYI, 'soft T' doesn't mean anything to western English speakers. They have a 'T' and a 'Th', the latter of which is actually a fricative, and not really a 'T' sound in the strict sense. I guess an Indian 'soft T' is better described as a more Italian sounding 'T', articulated mainly against the teeth.
- Myrmornis 9y agoIs a soft T like the way some Americans say "water", i.e. with a "D" like sound, as compared to the hard "T" in water traditional in British English?
- kinkrtyavimoodh 9y agoNo. It's a soft T the way Spanish or Italian speakers say their Ts.
- njsubedi 9y agoImagine saying "both age" without the "bo"
- tacomonstrous 9y agoThat's actually closer to the voiced retroflex sound which Indians often use as their 'hard D', articulated further back in the palate, with the tongue rolled back a bit.
- smnrchrds 9y agoI was wondering about that. Tez means quick in Azerbaijani Turkish as well. It's interesting that it has the same meaning in a language spoken so far away.
- subsidd 9y agoNot having a wallet option is a deal breaker. Cashless payments is very popular amongst youth here and majority of us college students don't have a functional bank account which makes us either carry our parents debit cards or our parents "Paytm" us (yes, it's become a verb here) our monthly pocket money. Regardless of that, there is still a very poor adoption of cashless modes of payments by street hawkers and kirana stores. And many high revenue businesses I have seen going directly for card POS systems like mswipe etc as wallets have some monthly limits and high fees for transferring to bank account. So the competition for tez is with physical card swipes and seeing the overall internet connection health even in the cities, it's a pain to use apps to pay majority of the times.
- piyush_soni 9y agoYes, I was surprised because they already have the 'Google Wallet' in other countries. They could have just expanded that here with all the bells and whistles of adding your credit cards, debit cards etc. along with UPI.
- fooker 9y agoI have a suspicion that these use the same backend and the new brand is for marketing purposes.
- ashwinm 9y agoNo its not. Why do you want wallet when you can transfer directly from bank account with same ease? 270 million bank accounts were opened under Jan Dhan, mainly poor. Paytm is transforming itself to payment bank and UPI provider.
- subsidd 9y agoIt's for me, not for you. Opinion not generalised assumption.
- cbhl 9y agoLots of people are unbanked/underbanked -- that is where mobile payments (like MPESA) shine. Assuming that everyone has a credit card and/or bank account is a US-centric assumption that came about as a result of COPPA, and the big companies miss out on getting adoption from teens, children, and people who have been locked out of the financial system.
- owaislone 9y ago"Government of India has made it mandatory to link your Aadhar number with your Tez account. Please link your Aadhar number to enjoy uninterrupted service." - Waiting for this to happen. My Indian friends say they are getting these messages from the Income Tax department, their banks and even their ISPs, e-wallets providers, telcoms etc.
- amrrs 9y agoThis is a story i'm trying to understand. 1. Indian Government wants to emulate something like SSN (in the US) as a single identifier for every citizen in this country. 2. This is an easy way for a Government to track the actions of every individual digitally and financially - end of Privacy!
- halflings 9y ago1) SSN is not really a model for a unique identifier for every citizen. Immigrants have SSNs too, and can have different ones if they have done multiple stays in the country. You also can live without an SSN in the US. 2) I mean... the government is entitled to know where your money is coming from if they are asking you for taxes. otherwise, there would be no way to combat tax fraud. This is not a new thing.
- mavendependency 9y agoWhy not confine this number to banking, then.
- fgpwd 9y agoyes, just read the news that driving licenses have to be linked with aadhar. Phone numbers have to be too. Pretty soon it would be impossible to do anything without aadhar = end of privacy
- wtmt 9y agoWith the heavy push for linking it almost everywhere, the government could also use it against individual citizens (dissidents) to cause "civil death" - can't drive, can't use bank accounts, can't study in schools/colleges, can't have a cell phone number, can't have a salaried job (where tax is deducted at source and PAN is expected to be linked), can't get pension...can't even conduct a funeral for a relative (this is the latest move - death certificates require Aadhaar of the dead or that of a close relative). It's truly "one number to rule them all"!!! In the hands of an oppressive government, dissent can be easily stifled and quelled!
- djhworld 9y agoWhat is the difference between this and Android Pay?
- khrm 9y agoThis one uses an Indian method of payment called UPI which is inter-operable with other banks app.
- vincengomes 9y agoTez means Fast or Speed in hindi. Fun Fact: In the 1994 Keanu Reeves movie the number plate for his car is 646 TEZ.
- senatorobama 9y agoMust be Arabic or Persian in origin...
- theptip 9y agoPersian and Hindi are both Indo-European languages, so they share a common root. (Arabic isn't in that language family). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages
- Manishearth 9y agoLanguages don't only derive from other languages in their family. Hindi has both Persian and Arabic influences, so it could plausibly be Arabic in origin. It isn't in this case, though.
- egeozcan 9y agoAccording to the Armenian-Turkish language researcher Sevan Nişanyan[1], it is of Persian origin, with a likely link to the Old Turkish "Tez", which means escaping. Going very off-topic here but it's interesting if you like etymology: In modern Turkish "Tez" means "in a short time", but also "thesis", which we borrowed from French who took it (ultimately) from Old Greek "títhēmi" which is evolved from the root "*dhē-" (to put) in the Proto-Indo-European language. [1]: http://www.nisanyansozluk.com/?k=tez1&lnk=1 http://www.nisanyansozluk.com/?k=tez1&lnk=1
- senatorobama 9y agoEtymology is a great hobby of mine. Another mind-blowing one is the Indian name/attribute 'Deva' and Latin 'divine' both had the same root. Funny to think that Indians and Europeans were once the same people, and probably mixed with the Dravidians to make the modern Indian.
- eevilspock 9y agoWhat better way to invade the privacy of and collect data on another billion or so people?
- azhuesing 9y ago1)The question is, how to gain transaction in a market where employees ask for paychecks over PayTM. 2)I wish the article would have mentioned India's ban of paper money as legal tender. 3) Tez roughly translates to "fast" in Hindi
- abhij89 9y agoAs long as country doesn't mandates using cashless payment modes, launching new payment apps won't help. Country already has too many such apps, with google bringing another it will only eat the competitions share of profit, instead of increasing the demand. Indian people still aren't very comfortable with online payments. They still like to trade in cash.
- eqtn 9y agoCurrently UPI transactions are free (except for a few banks). So many are transferring using this. Once they start charging the user for transaction, this will drop. Even if the charge is .50 paise.
- kamaal 9y agoThe charge has to be 0. For one simple reason most of the everyday buying in India is in the FMCG sector where profits are razor thin. No one will be spending the profit equivalent just for a transaction.
- BilalBudhani 9y agoI've been using Chillr app for payments, And it has a great experience but sadly there's a limit of 5k/day – which is ridiculously low if they want SME to go cashless. Whereas, Google's Tez has a 100k/day limit which IMO would work as a leverage for the app.
- flyingf0x 9y agoChillr app now have 1L per day limit on UPI, the other IMPS limit is as mandated by the respective bank.
- sidcool 9y agoI have downloaded it, and it's a bit clunky to work with. Hope they iterate fast on this one. But I also think, this should not have been a problem since I used Google Wallet and it was a superior experience. May be the teams were different?
- ashwinm 9y agoGoogle wallet don't have licence in india. Its an outdated concept to UPI anyway.
- josh2600 9y agoNot to be confused with TEZ the abbreviation for Tezos, the largest ICO (cryptocurrency) ever.
- SmallBob 9y agoGoogle captures the world, good luck Google.
- dandare 9y agoI like how beautifully white are all the people in Tez ads. /s
- dandare 9y agoYes, downvote me because I pointed out to blatant racism.
- srikz 9y agoAh, Google is using their Nearby tech for something directly useful! Still surprised how little it (or similar tech) is in use
- relyio 9y agoThe name is poorly chosen imho. This is going to create confusion with an existing high-profile cryptocurrency project (Tezos, written in OCaml).
- atomicnumber1 9y agoit's an Hindi word meaning "Fast" which I believe reflects the app characteristics accurately.
- atomicnumber1 9y agoThe Problem is not the quality app but the adoption rate. There are already tons of UPI apps available and none so far have been successful (Bhim, Phonepe and paytm are top 3). Google is already is late to the game. So, If Google wants this to make it hit, it really needs to heavily market it. Otherwise It would be like another futile attempt to switch Indians to digital payment systems, which currently, they are reluctant. I have high hopes for this one.