With 16 Mn MAUs, Google Tez crosses 50 million downloads

The battle for digital payments in India is currently being fought on UPI turf between Paytm, PhonePe and Google Tez. With about 94 million transactions in July, PhonePe has emerged as the leader in UPI ecosystem while Paytm has been fighting closely with the Flipkart-owned company for driving more transactions.

The distant third player Google Tez seems to have been catching on fast. Within a year of launch, the company commands a little less than 20 per cent market share in UPI ecosystem. And, according to a notification sent to users, Google Tez has just crossed 50 million downloads in India.

When compared numbers on Play Store, PhonePe has 50 million plus downloads. Paytm has more than 100 million smartphones who downloaded its application.

Soon after launching Google Tez in September 2017, it accounted for 52 per cent of Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transactions in India in December 2017. The volume of the transaction had grown 8X to reach 145 million transactions in December 2017 from a mere 17 million in August (before Tez launch).

So far, Google Tez is largely being used for peer to peer fund transfer and paying utility bills. While the figure for the active number of Google Tez users is not public, it has about 16 million active users back in May. On the line of Paytm Inbox, Tez also had an integrated chat feature inside the app.

Besides English, Tez supports 7 local languages including Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, and Telugu. Focus on local languages and cashbacks attached to utility payments have helped it to drive downloads rate quickly.

A quick look at UPI ecosystem

Leaving Paytm and Google Tez behind, PhonePe had claimed the top spot on the UPI network in July. It claimed to cross 94 million monthly transaction volume on UPI network during the 31 days period.

Importantly, Paytm and Google’s Tez didn’t disclose their UPI transaction data for July.

As per NPCI data, about 235 million transactions were recorded in July on UPI. Out of which, PhonePe alone facilitated over 40 per cent transactions (94 million).

Although, the figure for the last month is below expectation as UPI transaction witnessed a decline of 4.5 per cent in terms of volume, reveals NPCI data. This is the second time since its inception when the government-run platform witnessed a downfall in comparison to the previous month.

Meanwhile, other third-party payments apps such as Mobikwik and FreeCharge have not disclosed any fresh data on UPI transactions.