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Google debuts Tez, a mobile payments app for India

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Re: Google debuts Tez, a mobile payments app for India

#41

"Government of India has made it mandatory to link your Aadhar number with your Tez account. Please link your Aadhar number to enjoy uninterrupted service." - Waiting for this to happen. My Indian friends say they are getting these messages from the Income Tax department, their banks and even their ISPs, e-wallets providers, telcoms etc.

Unless an order comes from the Supreme court, you can conveniently ignore all these messages. So far, the Supreme court has not mandated mobile/payments app linking with Aadhaar. Given the recent win in the privacy battle, Aadhaar proponents will find it hard to mandate linking Aadhaar with every goddamn financial activity.

Re: Google debuts Tez, a mobile payments app for India

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) SSN is not really a model for a unique identifier for every citizen. Immigrants have SSNs too, and can have different ones if they have done multiple stays in the country. You also can live without an SSN in the US. 2) I mean... the government is entitled to know where your money is coming from if they are asking you for taxes. otherwise, there would be no way to combat tax fraud. This is not a new thing.

But the way Aadhaar usage is being conceived by the Govt it seems to do more with the "tracking" aspect of it than finding trails of money. In fact it has little to do with the "money". For that we already have had PAN numbers (in case of individuals) which are unique and the Govt and the Income Tax department has record of it, so do the banks. Also, the way Aadhaar has been handled by the private contractors (the wa…

You are right. Remember those days when SIM card agents used to sell our data to marketing firms (and use to stalk girls), when those kind of amateurs get to handle Aadhar registration - the result would be data leaks!

Re: Google debuts Tez, a mobile payments app for India

#45
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Must be Arabic or Persian in origin...

Persian and Hindi are both Indo-European languages, so they share a common root. (Arabic isn't in that language family). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages

Languages don't only derive from other languages in their family.

Hindi has both Persian and Arabic influences, so it could plausibly be Arabic in origin. It isn't in this case, though.

Re: Google debuts Tez, a mobile payments app for India

#46
post #10

Not even a day and see the number of negative comments on the playstore.

Most negative comments are about people not able to add their bank account in the app but still getting deducted charges for verifying. Some of the comments - >> Edit - Moving to 3 from 1 as Google replied stating the official launch has yet to happen and the engineers are working on it. Just wondering why they made it go live publically prior actual launch. I wouldn't complain if they named it beta to begin with. Ho…

There's a ton of annoying stuff around bank accounts in India that makes doing anything online a major pain. Idk if this is Google's fault or the bank's fault in this case, but this is kinda to be expected :|

(AIUI there's a bunch of overregulation over online stuff that most online payments things don't gel well with. But I don't know enough about this, just have been bitten by it enough times)

Re: Google debuts Tez, a mobile payments app for India

#47
As long as country doesn't mandates using cashless payment modes, launching new payment apps won't help. Country already has too many such apps, with google bringing another it will only eat the competitions share of profit, instead of increasing the demand. Indian people still aren't very comfortable with online payments. They still like to trade in cash.

Re: Google debuts Tez, a mobile payments app for India

#48
post #10

Not even a day and see the number of negative comments on the playstore.

I install (iOS) and started the app, tried to verify OTP sent on SMS 7 times and it failed to verify every single time saying OTP is incorrect. Colleagues around me faced the same issue. They all gave up and I also quietly uninstalled the app. So maybe that's that.

Same here. SMS is not verifying. Initial glitch I guess.

Re: Google debuts Tez, a mobile payments app for India

#49

I live in India. Many people have launched UPI based payment apps. Even government launched an app called BHIM. It is really good. UPI is a really good concept. The problem: None of these apps is used by most of the vendors in cities. Except for Paytm which is available with many small vendors in cities. They used the demonetization period to heavily market the app by going vendor to vendor singing them up.BHIM is re…

>>Except for Paytm which is available with many small vendors in cities.

No. I live in Bangalore and 'many' small vendors don't accept Paytm. They did it momentarily as a last ditch effort to not see their business crash.

Cash has come back like no tomorrow.

Also you don't have to teach people anything, or provide any amount of free internet plans. If they are smart enough to use WhatsApp and while away time on the internet to do unproductive stuff they can also use payment apps.

The reason why don't use it because they want to cheat on taxes. That is the issue. And its social and cultural in nature. Its not a technology related problem.

Re: Google debuts Tez, a mobile payments app for India

#50
post #47

As long as country doesn't mandates using cashless payment modes, launching new payment apps won't help. Country already has too many such apps, with google bringing another it will only eat the competitions share of profit, instead of increasing the demand. Indian people still aren't very comfortable with online payments. They still like to trade in cash.

Currently UPI transactions are free (except for a few banks). So many are transferring using this. Once they start charging the user for transaction, this will drop. Even if the charge is .50 paise.
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