Google may rename Tez as Pay & bring UPI to store

Bengaluru: After making a big bang entry into the Indian payments space with Tez, Google is close to renaming the service as Pay and consolidating it under the global payment umbrella of Google Pay, two people in the know of the matter said.

This could potentially open the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) as a mode of payment for app purchases on Google Play Store, which experts say is a huge use case waiting to be tapped.

When contacted, a Google spokesperson said there was nothing new to announce at this point in time. “We have always maintained that we will bring payments across different platforms,” the spokesperson said in an emailed response.


Google has been consolidating payments across Asia, so probably would want to use a global name to avoid confusion, one of the people mentioned above said.

On the possibility of opening UPI as a payment mode for app purchases on Play Store, the other person said: “Also on UPI, Play Store will be an invoke flow as that is the easiest way to integrate.”

Explaining the process of invoke flow, he said, once UPI was selected as a payment mode, the consumer would be prompted by his UPI app for a payment request which he would have to open on the app and authorise.

In a blog announcing the launch of Google Pay, Pali Bhat, vice-president of product management for payments at Google, said in January that the company would bring in both Google Wallet and Android Pay under the Google Pay umbrella for easier, simpler and safer usage. “We will also be bringing in these experiences to Tez users in India,” he had said at that time. ET noticed that Google has already started branding its payment service for app purchases and in-app purchases as Google Pay, currently offering credit and debit cards, net banking and carrier billing as payment options.

If Tez gets integrated into Google Pay, UPI too could be added as a payment mode here.

India has been one of the largest markets in terms of app downloads for Google, primarily due to the dominance of Android smartphones in India and the falling price of mobile Internet tariffs. However, the rate of revenue growth hasn’t kept the same pace. India ranked 29th in terms of revenue generated from sale of mobile apps on Android and iOS, according to app market data and insights company App Annie.

Tez, launched by the then finance minister Arun Jaitley in September last year, has managed to catch the imagination of the Indian public, having already crossed more than 50 million downloads.

The app has also managed to become one among the top three UPI aps in the country, fighting for market share with Paytm and PhonePe.

Working with four of the largest banks of the country — State Bank of India, ICICI Bank, Axis Bank and HDFC Bank — Tez clocks more than 50 million transactions every month, as per industry estimates.

Unlike WhatsApp Payments, which is the UPI offering from the house of Facebook, Tez has had a comparatively cleaner run in terms of regulatory hurdles.

Being a separate application altogether, Tez did not have problems over multiple factors of authentication and threats to user privacy, issues which skidded the launch of WhatsApp Payments.