Google Tez app will now allow users to pay the utility, electricity, and mobile postpaid bills within a matter of few clicks. Google has extended its payment support to 90 merchants including telecom companies such as Airtel, Vodafone, BSNL, and MTNL to enable the payments of mobile postpaid bills using Unified Payments Interface, or UPI. This move will pit Google Tez to compete against the likes of existing mobile bill payment services such as Paytm, FreeCharge, PhonePe, and MobiKwik among others. In addition, Google Tez will support other bill payments like state electricity, DTH, gas, and water.
The new bill payment feature can be found by tapping on ‘New Payment’ followed by ‘Pay your bills’ within the Google Tez app. Once you enter the bill payment page, you will find a list of merchants to choose your preferred one. Google Tez also comes with a bill reminder facility, wherein the app sends a notification to the user in cases of recurring bills to make the payment timely. It fetches the monthly bills as well as the previously paid bills. The Google Tez app comes with support for multiple user accounts.
Google Tez users who want to pay their mobile postpaid bills can choose from the list of telecom operators including Airtel, Vodafone, Idea Cellular, BSNL, Tata DoCoMo, and MTNL. The entry of Google Tez into mobile postpaid bill payments will make the other incumbents such as Paytm feel the heat as Google offers incentivisation to the users for using the service, in addition to its UPI-based payment interface that is simpler than most of the other players.
Recently, Facebook-owned WhatsApp began rolling out its UPI payments feature to the users in India via its beta version. WhatsApp’s entry into the P2P payments space raised eyebrows in the industry as WhatsApp enjoys a huge user base that is comparatively much higher than other payment platforms in India. Interestingly, Paytm CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma earlier this month lashed out at Facebook for introducing the WhatsApp payment service and said that foreign firms should not indulge deeper to ‘colonise’ India’s Internet sphere.
