Tez

~ the obituary ~

Tez was India-only at the rails layer, which is a stricter kind of regional than the usual one. It was not a question of language or marketing. The app sat directly on the Unified Payments Interface, a national instant transfer system launched in 2016 by the body India's banks set up to run retail payments, and there was nothing equivalent in Turkey to put it on. What we had in 2017 was bank apps and cards. Those worked, and nobody would call them the same thing.

Google launched it on 18 september 2017 at an event in Delhi. Tez means fast in Hindi, and the naming was the argument: this was the Next Billion Users group inside Google building for one market under a local name rather than shipping the American product with a translation bolted on. It came out in English plus seven Indian languages on day one.

Money moved between two ordinary bank accounts without anyone touching a card network. The bank did the transfer and Google did the interface, taking nothing out of the transaction itself. That model is why UPI displaced cards across India instead of the reverse, and it is why a free app could reach a scale that no wallet product in the West had managed.

~ the case file ~

~ the trick ~

Cash Mode was the part people actually talked about. Two phones held near each other exchanged a short burst of ultrasound, above the range of human hearing, and that burst carried enough to set up a transfer. Neither person had to hand over a phone number, and no NFC chip was involved, which mattered a great deal because most handsets selling in India at that price did not have one.

The rest was ordinary growth engineering, done well. Scratch cards paid out small random amounts after a transfer and a weekly draw offered a larger prize, which sounds cheap and worked exactly as intended. Eight and a half million installs in the first thirty seven days. Thirty million transactions by late october. By december 2017 Tez was carrying more than half of every UPI transaction in the country, three months after it existed.

~ the rename ~

On 28 august 2018, at Google for India in New Delhi, Caesar Sengupta announced that Tez was now Google Pay. The numbers he gave on the way out were 22 million users and over 750 million transactions worth more than 30 billion dollars on an annualized basis. The same announcement added pre-approved bank loans inside the app, which is closer to what the rename was in service of than any branding argument.

So Tez did not fail. It was absorbed by the brand it had beaten in its own market, because a company operating everywhere would rather have one name than the right one. The product survived and is still the default way a great many people in India pay for things. Cash Mode hung on for a while and then quietly stopped being mentioned. What went into the ground was the evidence that Google could build for one specific country instead of for everyone, and eleven months is not very long to have held that.

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