Tech giant Google said on Tuesday that its payments app Tez has acquired 12 million active users in just 10 weeks since its launch in India and that it will start offering bill payments.
The app has processed more than 140 million transactions since it was launched in September, Caesar Sengupta, vice president of product management at Google, said at the third edition of the Google for India event.
Tez operates atop the Unified Payments Interface, developed by the National Payments Corporation of India. It can be used where UPI payments are accepted. Sengupta said that Tez was the most used platform for the last two months for UPI transactions.
“Tez contributed to 53% of all UPI transactions in October and 73% in November. In addition, Tez has brought 5.25 lakh merchants on its platform,†he said.
Sengupta also said that the app was getting a new feature in the form of ‘Bill Pay’. “Tez will remind users when a bill is due, and users will never pay the same bill twice as the status will be automatically updated. More than 70 billers will be supported, including utilities and direct-to-home service providers… The feature will start rolling out gradually over the next month,†he said.
Users will be able to pay bills for electricity, water, gas, broadband and entertainment services of companies such as Bharti Airtel, DishTV and Tata Power.
The speed at which Tez has acquired customers without a catalyst such as demonetisation could be worrying for rivals such as Paytm and MobiKwik. While Mobikwik has 60 million active users, industy estimates indicate that Paytm has over 147 million active users.
Vijay Shekhar Sharma-led Paytm and Bipin Preet Singh-led Mobikwik offer similar bill pay services in the country. These bill pay services include insurance, broadband, electricity, water, gas, mobile, metro rail services and municipal payments.
