Google is taking dive into mobile payment in India with the launch of its innovative application Tez, which uses special Audio QR for authentication.

With more than 300 million smartphone users and growing at a rapid pace, India is faster at adopting epayments whereby credit cards had been taking a long time to penetrate. Hundreds of millions still prefer cash transaction and mostly are in the petty trading purposes with amounts below credit card thresholds. With the rapid improvement of connectivity in India, mobile internet is becoming a daily part of life for many Indians, giving opportunity to newer payment methods. Accelerating this, was the recent demonitisation program by the central government, many Indians conveniently adopted mobile payment as their method for grocery bills and were spared by the shortage of currency.

Google has a long term interest in the second most populated country in world, with various projects already under going after Prime Minister Modi made an open declaration to move India into the digital economy space with his Digital India initiative. Aptly so the search giant launches Googles Tez a payments and commerce app built specifically for India with consent from all top banks and built it over the country’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) standard. Users of the app can make direct bank to bank payments, for quick small transaction just direct pay without the need to share banking account details or phone number to keep those personal information from being shared. What’s unique is AQR a propriety Audio QR technology which Google says is more convenient and secure where the phones will be visibly talking to each other, unlike NFC technology this works on any type of smartphone be it iOS or Android.

For businesses Google created Tez for Business, there vendors can set their own business channel in the page to interact directly with the consumers without the need to install multiple apps. Both online and offline will be able to use the payment app to execute transaction and payments made into their current or individual accounts. Mobile payment methods is the next ambitious effort by governments across the globe including here in Malaysia with Google, Alipay, ApplePay and many apps already embarking on a massive scale, we could possibly leave our ‘American’ at home.