Last year, Google introduced the ‘Tez person-to-person payments’ app in India. Now, the giant has decided to add a Google Tez chat feature in the app. This new feature allows the users to send messages related to each transaction. According to the Economic Times reports, the feature is already rolling out now. The motive behind this upgradation is to make tracking the context of payments easier.
It’s not the first time that Google has utilized the messaging solution in other applications. Not much earlier, WhatsApp did quite a similar thing by launching its own in-app payments system for India. It is believed to be a huge deal, especially with 200 million Indian users. As a matter of fact, the majority of smartphone owners in India use WhatsApp. As of now, India’s largest mobile payments company, Paytm, has quite the same number of users as WhatsApp, and they also introduced a similar chat option late in 2017.
Google and WhatsApp do follow the Indian government’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) system for transferring money. Instead of maintaining a virtual wallet, they basically tap directly into bank accounts. However, it’s quite a funny observation when you notice the fact that one company just added payment option to a chat app, whereas the other did exactly the opposite.
