Google Tez In India
The little birdies who chirped about launch of payment services in India from Google, are no longer little, by the time search giant came up with Tez. Whether the wait was worth it? This even Google search engines would not second guess, unless of course, Alphabet is working on a future prediction engine. 🙂
Not on a lighter note, we believe this is a good step ahead to validate the hypothesis if India and Indians, by large, shall embrace digital payments.
Thrust on Digital Payments
Recent history is filled with concrete steps to push digital payments in India:
a) The Indian Government has made a great push and open willingness to support digital payments.
b) NPCI has made the entire payment stack available for anyone to plug and play,
c) PayTM, AmazonPay and others have spent millions of marketing bucks to educate Indian masses to adopt digital payments. They continue to lure them with offers.
d) Airtel, Ola, Uber & Flipkart are making consistent effort to migrate their respective set of huge consumer base to use digital payments.
The consumer adoption has increased but not akin to the efforts put in. The digital payments in last one year has grown by 55% (surge during demon included). The Government is targeting 25Bn digital trasnactions by March 2018, which looks too much of a stretch.
Enter Google’s Tez
Now who better than Google, planets largest search resource and De-facto window to the web for common man, to try and push for this change.
Positives & Expectations from Tez:
– Not a wallet, so no need to transfer money and store in a separate account.
– No need for a debit/credit card, it is expected to make mobile phones connect with bank accounts so that payment can be made without dependence on credit or debit card.
– Intuitive interface, we can expect the interface to be simple, and Google is best in making things simple on net. We should expect a multi lingual interface as well.
– Use case options, with Google’s reach, having decent representation of sellers (merchants) should not be an issue and this would to kick start the usage.
Observation and Future Path of Tez:
– P2P payments (Phase 1), like PayPal in USA, if Google Tez catches on the imagination of Indians making P2P payments using Tez, we believe that they would have cracked the code and PayPal history can be re-created here in India.
– Merchant & Utility payment (Phase 2), we believe this would be easier to roll out once P2P payment get people fully adopt to digital payments.
– Future Innovations (Phase 3), of course we can expect Google to launch voice based payments or bio-metric auth. based payments in near future, which would make payments a really interesting experience.
We understand Google wants to take this product to Asia pacific market as well, which of course, would follow a different strategy to appeal to locals in those regions, but real test lies here with a billion odd potential customers.
For today let’s look forward to the brighter future and save any skepticism towards product penetration and thought on security concerns for later.
Facebook and WhatsApp are following this development closely. We are waiting to hear from them as well, sooner the better, else the bird would be old enough to fly away.
#Kunnal Sharma
Founder Cleuz
P.S. The picture above is created by Cluez team and is Cleuz’s representation on Tez. It has no direct link with Google or Tez logo
