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Google moves big into mobile payments in Asia with launch of new app

Image: google tez/screenshot

Google is going big into Asia’s mobile payment scene.

The tech giant has launched a new mobile money app called Tez in India — a country with a smartphone user base of over 300 million, which has been named the world’s fastest growing smartphone market.

SEE ALSO: Asia’s newest mobile wallet may actually get the region to go cashless, finally

“Tez” which means fast in Hindi, lets users link up their bank accounts to their phones, allowing them to use the app to pay merchants in stores, and instantly transfer money to friends.

Google’s app isn’t just another of the many mobile payment apps out there. To make Tez count, Google made sure it worked with India’s national Unified Payments Interface (UPI), a payment system backed by the government and 19 major banks in the country.

Image: google tez/screenshot

That’s huge. With the support of huge banks, that ensures Tez will work for the vast majority of users in India, allowing them to transfer money to each other regardless of bank provider they’re with.

And unlike mobile wallet systems, users can skip the additional step of managing a separate wallet fund, and transfer money to and from their accounts directly.

To sign up for Tez, you simply key in your phone number, choose your bank, and the bank will verify your number with an SMS.

To send money to another user, you then enter in their UPI ID, or select their phone number from your contacts list, if they’re also using Tez.

Ping cash to a nearby friend

But if you don’t want to share private details like your bank account or phone number, Tez has got another trick up its sleeve.

Its “cash mode” option offers proximity-based transfer, and searches for another smartphone nearby with the Tez app. You can then send or receive money from whoever’s beside you.

However, there’s a limit of $1,560 (₹1,00,000) on money transfers in one day.

Half of India has bank accounts, but only 2 percent has credit cards

It’s a strategic move by Google to let Tez users link up their phones to their bank accounts, unlike apps like Apple Pay, which links to a user’s credit or debit card.

India has a low credit card penetration of 29.8 million cards — which equals to around just 2 percent of the population.

On the other hand, an estimated 53 percent of the country’s population has bank accounts.

But Google might have some competition soon.

Messaging app WhatsApp is in talks to launch its own payment app in India, which will also be run on a UPI framework.

Tez is available on both Android and iOS.

WATCH: Finally, a clock that can track all your family and friend’s locations

Read more: http://mashable.com/2017/09/18/tez-mobile-payments-google-india/

mobile wallet

Asia gets a new mobile wallet, and surprise, it’s not from a bank or payment company

Finally, people in Singapore are about to get an easier and quicker way to send money to a friend, via a mobile wallet app.

But surprisingly, it’s not coming from a bank or payment company — it’s coming from ride-hailing app, Grab.

SEE ALSO: You can now pay for public transport in China’s capital with Android phones

Grab, Uber’s biggest competition in Southeast Asia, on Wednesday announced users will be able to transfer funds in the app’s wallet between users, without fees.

They can do it by sending money over to a mobile number registered with Grab, or by physically scanning a friend’s QR code.

Image: GRAB

Image: grab

The function is similar to what users have with China’s WeChat and Alipay wallets — arguably the world leaders in simple peer-to-peer fund transfers.

But it’ll lack one key thing that the Chinese apps have. Your money in the Grab wallet can’t be transferred out to a bank account.

That means whatever you have in there needs to be spent on rides or to be sent back to other friends.

1,000 street vendors are coming

By the end of the year though, Grab plans to announce a raft of 1,000 small merchants in Singapore that’ll be on board, allowing you to pay with a scan of their QR codes.

Now we’re talking. The biggest barriers to cashless adoption in cash-reliant Southeast Asia are infrastructure and bank fees.

To take a credit card, a street vendor would have to get a point-of-sale system that works with MasterCard or Visa, and pay fees of between 1 percent and 3 percent on each transaction.

Alipay and Wechat, on the other hand, revolutionised the Chinese market with the simple QR code scanner, and far lower fees of less than 1 percent.

Grab hasn’t announced its merchant fee structure yet. But if it’s acceptably low to the small retailer, it could really help unshackle users here from carrying cash around.

In Singapore, at least, the cashless options haven’t been quite as slick as what China has. Recently, the country’s banks jointly announced a way to pay friends from your mobile banking app.

That process requires a 2FA token or SMS code, and way too many taps, in comparison to what Grab is showing off right now.

Local bank DBS has a QR code P2P payment option, but again it requires fiddling with 2FA codes. DBS has been trying to get small merchants onboard, to its credit.

For Grab, its headstart into the market with 1,000 merchants in Singapore (and presumably way more in the region) may well further entrench users in relying on the app, beyond calling for rides.

Grab already claims about 72 percent market share for private vehicle sharing, and 95 percent for taxis in Southeast Asia, where it’s in seven countries fighting Uber.

It also processes 1 billion payment transactions annually for rides, but it’s got to prepare to add merchants to that load soon.

So while the country continues to look for a way to go cashless, Grab’s already out of the gates. It’ll be interesting to see who’s next on its tail.

WATCH: Should we even really worry about GMOs?

Read more: http://mashable.com/2017/08/30/grab-wallet-singapore/