Google Pay for India
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Google Pay for India ₹
What I launched
As part of the founding design team, I helped define the 0→1 product direction for Tez, now rebranded to Google Pay India, and led the experiences that introduced millions of Indians to a new way of paying.
I led the conception and design of onboarding and payment method experiences, turning a new bank to bank payments technology into something millions of people could understand, trust, and use.
The opportunity
India was still overwhelmingly cash driven, even as hundreds of millions of people were coming online through smartphones.
At the same time, the newly introduced Unified Payments Interface (UPI) created a fundamentally different model for digital money: instant payments directly between bank accounts, without requiring users to maintain a separate digital wallet.
The opportunity was to investigate if we can make digital payments feel as simple, immediate, and universal as cash.
What we built
Tez was designed from the ground up for India around UPI, allowing people to send and receive money directly from their existing bank accounts.
I led the experience for getting users into this new ecosystem - from understanding the value of Tez and verifying their identity, to discovering and linking bank accounts, establishing payment credentials, and managing multiple payment methods.
The goal was to hide the complexity of the underlying financial infrastructure and create an experience that felt familiar, trustworthy, and remarkably simple.
A new mental model for money
For many users, digital payments meant cards, wallets, or stored balances. UPI introduced something fundamentally different: your existing bank account became the payment method. Onboarding had to teach this new model without making the underlying banking infrastructure feel complicated.
Trust was the design
We were asking people to connect their bank accounts to a brand new Google product and use it to move real money. Every step, from phone verification and bank discovery to setting a PIN, had to communicate security and progress without creating additional friction.
A fragmented ecosystem
The experience depended on a network of banks, telecom operators, SIM verification, debit cards, UPI infrastructure, and different account states. We had to make a fragmented financial ecosystem feel like one coherent Google product.
The new Million users
Tez needed to work for people with dramatically different levels of financial and technological familiarity, across languages, devices, connectivity conditions, and banking relationships. The design challenge was to make an unfamiliar financial system feel obvious.
Impact
12M active users in 10 weeks
Tez processed more than 140 million transactions within its first 10 weeks.
25M monthly active users in year 1
Within a year, the product was being used by 1.2 million businesses and had processed more than 860 million transactions.
Tez became Google Pay
Within a year after launch, Google brought Tez under the Google Pay brand as it unified its payments offerings globally - taking an India first product into Google's broader payments strategy.