• Finance Minister Arun Jaitley launched Google’s payment app – ‘Tez’. 
• Tez by Google is perhaps the simplest form of monetary transactions.
• Tez by Google and other ecosystems will make a major change in the digital payments landscape in India. 
• The tech giant claimed that Tez will enable money transfer directly from the bank accounts of customers, without them having to share their ‘personal information’. 
• The app will function on both Android and iOS platforms. 
• Google also said that the app will ‘understand’ eight Indian languages and will work with 55 banks
• Tez (which means “Fast” in Hindi is Google’s play to replace cash transactions and become a more central part of how people pay for things, using their mobile to do so. 
• But it’s also a chance for the company to push out some new technologies – like audio QR (AQR), which lets users transfer money by letting their phones speak to each other with sounds – to see how it can make that process more frictionless, and therefore more attractive to use than cash itself. 
• Tez will see Google linking up with several major banks in the country by way of UPI (Unified Payments Interface) – a payment standard and system backed by the government in its push to bring more integrated banking services into a very fragmented market.
• There will also be phones coming to the market from Lava, Micromax, Nokia and Panasonic with Tez preloaded, the company said.
• Google has confirmed to me that payments made and taken using UPI are free for consumers and small merchants
• To be clear, Tez is not a mobile “wallet” in the same way as PayTM offers a mobile wallet, where money is stored in the app and needs to be topped up to be used;
• It’s more like Apple’s Wallet or other mobile wallets in the west: a place that links up your phone with your bank accounts to let you use your phone as a way to deduct payments from those accounts.
• Supported banks include Axis, HDFC Bank, ICICI and State Bank of India and others that support UPI. 
• Online payment partners include large food chains like Dominos, transport services like RedBus, and Jet Airways
• The app has support for English, Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, and Telugu.
• For money transfers, there is a limit of ₹1,00,000 in one day across all UPI apps, and 20 transfers in one day.

About AQR and Tez

• Google says that AQR – the sound-based format for transferring money securely between devices – is its own proprietary technology.
• This appears to be the first time that Google has used it for payments, although it has used ultrasonic sound for transferring information between devices before
• For example, the tech has been used in Chromecast to connect devices since 2014. Other startups that have used audio-based “codes” to transfer payments and other data before include Lisnr, and Chirp.
• While AQR might seem like a neat technical twist, there are some practical reasons behind why Google might opt for this in Tez.
• For starters, it obviates the need for NFC in the device, and in the payment devices of merchants or whoever else a person is planning to transact with.
• The other thing is that it makes any kind of contactless transaction with the device fairly flexible and easy. 
• Services like Airdrop on iPhones require Bluetooth and if you’ve used it before isn’t that seamless and foolproof to turn on (even though it works like a charm when it does). QR codes, meanwhile, require you to turn on the camera on your device and physically align it with a code on another screen, a potentially fiddly and difficult process.
• Using audio taps into some of the most basic features on even the most basic phones, a speaker and a microphone.
• Google has also trademarked the name in other Asian countries like Indonesia and the Philippines, so there seems to be a wider strategy to expand this to other regions.
• India, the second-most populated country in Asia after China, is a ripe market for mobile payment services, with a rapidly expanding middle class with more disposable income and a wider population that is very tech-focussed, with an estimated 300 million smartphones in use today.
• Digital payments are expected to reach a volume of $500 billion annually by 2020, according to a report from BCG and Google.

Source:TH