NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Alphabet‘s Google recently launched Tez, a mobile wallet app for the Indian market. The app links to a user’s bank account and enables peer-to-peer transfers with Audio QR (AQR), which uses ultrasonic sounds to “talk” to other phones without the need for NFC (near-field communications) chips.

Tez supports India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI), a government-backed standard aimed at unifying the fragmented banking market on a single platform. The app is now available on iOS and Android, and new devices from Micromax, Lava, Nokia, and Panasonic will ship with Tez pre-installed.

It’s certainly logical for Google to launch a mobile wallet for India’s 300 million smartphone users. But it also might seem odd to introduce Tez instead of Android Pay, which already has footholds in Asia in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan.

Photo courtesy of Simone McCourtie.