Cashbacks, Rewards, and the Growth of Google Tez Payment App in India

Tez, Google's payments app for India that's built on top of the country's Unified Payments Interface (UPI), was launched in September last year. By early December - a little less than three months after the launch - the app had clocked 12 million users and 140 million transactions.

Those are impressive numbers, even if the government backed UPI app BHIM, which also launched last year, clocked 10 million users at a much faster rate - within 10 days. In terms of the number of transactions, however, Tez has completely blown past its competition.

When Gadgets 360 reached out to Google this week, the company reiterated that Tez has seen over 140 million transactions in the roughly three months since it launched on September 18. In contrast, according to figures from the National Payments Corporation of India - the entity that operates the payments interface UPI - the government-based BHIM app has seen just about 62 million transactions over 12 months, with only 9 million transactions in December.

Why the huge difference in the number of transactions, despite the two apps having similar user numbers? Is Google Tez such a game changer? At the time of the Tez launch, DD Mishra, Research Director, Gartner had said that Tez had the potential to do so. "It is too early to say whether it can be a game changer, but yes it has the capabilities to bring some disruption," he had said.

Google, on its part, credits the success of the Tez app to its "simplicity".

"People prefer simple, safe and trusted apps that are widely used. We’re happy that people are recommending Tez to their friends and family because they like the simplicity of the product," a company spokesperson told Gadgets 360.