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Google Tez
One month into the digital payment ecosystem in India, Google's Unified Payments Interface (UPI) app Tez has has racked up over 5 million installs and has strong repeat usage among customers.While the country's digital payments space has been booming over the past year following the government's demonetisation initiative, the ecosystem has not yet stabilised. Players such as Paytm have already logged over 100 million users, but UPI has begun to disrupt these prepaid payment instruments (PPI).Google might have entered the space a year late, but competition is still scarce. So far only the National Payment Corporation of India's BHIM app and Flipkart-owned PhonePe have managed to win over 10 million users. The tech giant has managed to get halfway there in just a month."Sometimes, there is a late-mover advantage as well when the technology or concept is emerging and one can learn from other's mistakes. The Indian market has huge opportunity and despite the presence of a number of ...
Internet search giant Google says its new payments app for India Tez garnered 410,000 active users who made transactions worth Rs 1.8 crore in the first 20 hours of the app being launched.Tez was one of the most hotly anticipated apps of the year, marking the entry of Google in India's fast growing digital payments space. The unprecedented traffic the service encountered led to a temporary delay in allowing new users to sign up."We are really happy with the numbers. I wish we hadn't had some of the ups and downs we had yesterday, but still we're very happy with the first few hours of engagement. We're working on a number of different user experience features in the coming months," said Caesar Sengupta, Vice President of Product Management at Google.Sengupta said that while the digital payments space in India seemed crowded, considering the extremely small size of the market, there was enough room for everyone to grow. Moreover, he said that the digital payments space would be ...
Tez, (fast) the India-specific payments app built by Google turned slow on the first day of its launch on Monday drawing ire from users who complained of an inability to sign up on the hotly anticipated service.Hundreds of users took to Twitter and other social networks to express their displeasure, with a few of them even offering Tez one-star ratings on Google's Play Store. Within a few hours of its launch it had racked up close to 600 one-star ratings and only a few over 700 five-star ratings.A Google spokesperson told Business Standard that the large number of failed registrations were due to a surge in the number of users trying to sign up on the service. He added that a team at Google India was working around the clock to identify and fix bugs that users were unearthing.The launch also carried weight as Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley unveiled the app, highlighting that it gelled well with the government's move to digitise payments and bring in more people into the formal ...