Even as Google's entry to India's payments industry[1] puts it on a collision course with Paytm[2], the country's largest mobile wallet app backed by Alibaba[3] and SoftBank[4], Google's Caesar Sengupta believes the company's new digital payments app for the Indian market - Tez[5] - will help all the rivals.
In a televised interview with NDTV's Vikram Chandra, Sengupta, who is the vice president of Google's Next Billion Users programme, said Tez will create a network effect of sorts which would benefit all the players fighting for a slice of the country's payments industry which is expected to grow as big as $500 billion in four years.
Google's Tez app is powered by UPI[6], the payments infrastructure built by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI). Several players including Flipkart's PhonePe[7] and NPCI's BHIM[8] app use UPI[9] as the backend platform to allow their customers to send and receive money. Several banks including ICICI[10] and HDFC[11] themselves have their own UPI-powered payments apps as well.
"What is really exciting is that UPI is built as an open, interoperable system. When you create an ecosystem effort like that what happens is even when one part of that ecosystem does well the whole ecosystem does well," Sengupta said. Google's Tez app can be used to pay to people who've other UPI-powered apps installed on their smartphones. "It's one of those network effect things," he said.
Mobile wallet apps, which Google's Tez app at present doesn't support, are expected to face most of the heat, analysts said. Unlike Paytm and MobiKwik, that require customers to top...