Google Bringing Google Tez Mobile Payment Service to India?

September 18, 2017         By: Steven Anderson

It seems that the mobile payments market in India is about to get a whole new class of elephant in the room, thanks to new reports from India’s news site The Ken. The Ken’s reports suggest that Google plans to launch Google Tez—which translates to “fast”—in the country, a move which will likely destabilize the local mobile payments market in a big way.

Google Tez is reported to be a significant step up from the current product line like Android Pay and Google Wallet. It offers support for the government-backed Unified Payments Interface (UPI) system, as well as some cross-platform support for major mobile payments figures already on the ground like Mobikwik and Paytm.

Google, of course, wasn’t talking, but if this actually does go through as planned, it could be a hit. Google has a major presence in India thanks to the proliferation of Android devices in the country, but it’s not exactly generating a lot of revenue from that operation. However, if it can bring out a major new mobile payments app, that could change, both substantially and rapidly.

A report from BCG and, interestingly, Google, notes that the mobile payments market in India could clear $500 billion annually by 2020. Add to this the fact that India has a rapidly-growing internet user base as well as as the second-largest smartphone market around, and it’s a recipe for huge growth in mobile payments. That’s called a lot of firms into the fray that weren’t there before—WhatsApp was one of the most recent such entries—and now Google may be joining in.

The mobile payments market in India is still sufficiently young that a lot of people probably don’t have a really firm attachment to any one platform. That means drawing in market share could be as simple as a couple proprietary features heavy on the gee-whiz. Since Google has already put a lot of development capability into emerging markets as part of its Next Billion Users (NBU) program, seeing them target India isn’t really out of line at all.

So while Google Tez may not actually hit the market, the concept is sound enough, and likely to end up as the next major step for Google into a market eager for mobile payments products.