At its Google For India event, Google announced a rebranding of Tez, its UPI-based payment app for India. Instead of Tez, Google will now be calling the app as Google Pay — the same name that it uses for its payment app across the world.
Apart from the change in branding, Google did not announce any new features for Google Pay, though the company is working on quite a few of them. The company promises to bring Google Pay to more retail stores and online merchants thereby allowing users to use GPay to pay for their purchases. Some major merchants that will soon support Google Pay include Pinelabs, Bill Desk, and more.
Tez has turned out to be incredibly popular in India where it is used by over 22 million people and processes transactions of over $30 billion annually. Google is also working with some of the major banks in India — HDFC, ICICI, Federal Bank, and Kotak Mahindra — to provide Google Pay/Tez users with instant pre-approved loans. The feature will make its way to eligible users in the coming weeks.
Additionally, Google announced at the event that it is bringing Hindi language support to Google Assistant on the Google Home. Assistant on smartphones is already capable of understanding and conversing in Hindi but for some reason, the support has not made its way to Google Home. Apart from Hindi, Google Assistant will also gain support for seven Indic languages in the next few months.
[Via Google]