FM Arun Jaitley to launch Google payment app "TEZ"

Come Monday, Google will be entering India’s fast growing digital payment ecosystem with the new app “TEZ” (means fast in Hindi). Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley will launch Google’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI)-based digital payment service called “Tez” in the national capital.

The Finance Ministry confirmed the news with a tweet on Saturday. The report of Google entering India’s fast growing digital payment ecosystem appeared in the media on Thursday, following which Google India sent out an invite for an event in New Delhi on a September 18.

UPI is a payment system launched by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) and regulated by the Reserve Bank of India which facilitates the instant fund transfer between two bank accounts on the mobile platform. The other big player to join India’s growing digital payment market is Facebook-owned WhatsApp. It has been in the news for working towards a UPI-based interface on its platform.

According to the blog website “WABetaInfo”, WhatsApp is giving shape to its plans towards bank-to-bank transfer using the UPI system. Some mobile messaging platforms like WeChat and Hike Messenger already support UPI-based payment services.

Speaking on the UPI service, Aruna Sundararajan, Secretary, Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) said, “The infrastructure of digital payments in India is expected to increase three-fold by the end of 2017 with almost five million electronic points of sale machines, “We expect that by December, the number will actually increase up to five million PoS, which means that the infrastructure for digital payments is going to grow three times in the short span of one year.”

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