Google may rebrand Tez as Pay, to consolidate payments biz in India

Tech giant Google is on the verge of renaming its payments platform in India Tez as ‘Pay’ and will bring it under its global service Google Pay, a report in a financial daily said, citing two people in the know.

The move will allow users to make app purchases via the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) on the Google Play Store, The Economic Times reported.

According to ET, Google has already started using the Google Pay nomenclature for app and in-app purchases on its marketplace. Once Tez is renamed as Pay, UPI will most likely be added as a payment option, the report said.

As Google has been consolidating its payments service across Asia, it is renaming Tez under its global brand to prevent confusion, the ET report stated.

In January this year, Pali Bhat, Google’s global head for payments products, said that the company was merging Google Wallet and Android Pay under Google Pay, the report added.

Google launched the Tez app to the Indian market in September last year. It was built atop UPI, developed by the National Payments Corporation of India. In December 2017, the company said that the app had got on board 12 million active users.

In March, the company introduced a chat option into Tez, taking on wallet firm Paytm, which in August last year also released a similar chat feature.

Besides Paytm, Tez competes with Facebook-owned WhatsApp, which is close to rolling out its payments feature across the country. It had launched a beta version of the service in February this year.