Author: azeeadmin

As an organization, Mozilla has always championed transparency, and today, it’s taking this one step further by pulling back the curtains on its internal data for how many people regularly use Firefox and how they use the browser.

The new Firefox Public Data Report will include information about yearly and monthly active users, how many hours per day those users spend with Firefox, how long it takes users to upgrade to the latest version, how many Firefox users install add-ons, which add-ons are the most popular and more. That data can be segmented by region and by the top 10 countries where Firefox is most popular.

The data that’s available in the report today goes back just over a year and Mozilla plans to update the site at least once per week. Mozilla stresses that this data doesn’t come from some kind of real-time monitoring system but that it’s aggregated and anonymized data from a subset of its users. Indeed, if you are a Firefox user, you can simply go to about:telemetry and see what data is sent to Mozilla.

You can find a few examples of what kind of data Mozilla is publishing in the gallery below.

[gallery ids="1699818,1699819,1699820,1699822"]

Right now, these new reports only focus on desktop users. Mozilla noted that getting data from mobile users is a bit harder, but that it plans to include data from mobile users in the next version of this tool. That hardware report hasn’t been updated since May, though.

This launch builds upon another Firefox data project at Mozilla that launched about two years ago, the Firefox Hardware Report, which provides some insights into what processors and graphics card Firefox users use, for example.

Africa has been one of the least-developed regions globally when it comes to technology and being on the less advanced side of the so-called digital divide. But with a huge population and a set of nations whose economies are rapidly changing, we are seeing a significant knock-on effect in tech. Today, one of the more interesting startups, in the area of financial services, is announcing some funding that underscores that trend.

Paystack, a Stripe-like startup out of Lagos that provides online payment facilities to merchants and others by way of an API and a few lines of code, is announcing that it has raised $8 million in a Series A round of funding. The company is active today in Nigeria, where its payment API integrates with tens of thousands of businesses, and in two years it has grown to process 15 percent of all online payments; and the plan is to both continue to growing in its home country, as well as expand to more, starting with Ghana.

I describe Paystack as “Stripe-like”, and in an interesting twist, the round is being led by none other than Stripe itself — a mark not just of how the latter (once a YC startup itself) is eyeing up like-minded global founders and businesses as it continues to grow, but also how Stripe understands the challenges of breaking into a region like Africa, and therefore sees an opportunity to work with and support those who are.

“The Paystack founders are highly technical, fanatically customer oriented, and unrelentingly impatient,” says Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe, in a statement. “We’re excited to back such people in one of the world’s fastest-growing regions.”

“It takes a lot of local nuances to build for African businesses,” said Shola Akinlade, the CEO of Paystack who co-founded the company with Ezra Olubi (who is the CTO) and are pictured above. “Paystack seems to be the only one doing this.”

In 2016, Paystack became the first startup from Nigeria to enter Y Combinator, and the incubator is doing some follow-on investing in this round. Other strategic investors in this Series A include Visa and the Chinese online giant Tencent, parent of WeChat and a plethora of other services. (Tencent also invested in Paystack’s previous round: the startup has raised $10 million to date.)

Stripe scored a big win in financial services in the West when it developed a very quick and easy way of integrating payments into any app or website, taking what used to involve a lot of integration and negotiation and reducing it into a few lines of code. It came just at a time when apps were starting to take off, and people were coming around to feeling more comfortable about making financial transactions online, as long as they were easy to do.

Paystack has followed a similar template, albeit much more localised.

Nigeria is one of the biggest economies in Africa and the largest in the sub-Saharan region, but even so, it is only just getting the ball rolling on digitising commerce. There have been other payment providers operating in the market — Interswitch being perhaps the biggest — but Akinlade describes Paystack’s focus as a more modern take on payments. Specifically, its focus is on integrating the wide range of payment options that Nigerians (and soon, those in other countries in Africa) use both to accept payments and make them and making each of them equally easy to use.

Ease of use belies the fact that the list of payment options across Africa is long and fragmented. Paystack makes it possible to make and take payments using payment cards, which is the norm in many Western markets, but also bank transfers, as well as a number of payment routes that have arisen out of the fact that many people are “unbanked” — that is, without bank accounts or credit histories built by using payment cards.

These include mobile money services, which essentially turn a user’s mobile calling account into a place to store and pay out money; and USSD-based services, which use an even more basic part of a phone’s communications infrastructure to send messages and money (USSD has been using by a number of other providers looking to provide more connectivity in emerging markets).

These newer routes tend to be more localised, but are also some of the most important to have in a payments service. According to the World Bank, mobile money is the fastest-growing route to financial inclusion across Africa: while the share of adults with bank accounts in sub-Saharan Africa has remained flat, the number of those using mobile money have increased by over 20 percent.

Integrating these options involves Paystack not only working with all major banks, but all major mobile carriers to cover the range of payment methods.

It’s a long list of potential partners, but one that the Paystack founders have been working with for more than just two years.

Akinlade, who had studied computer science at university, worked first for Heineken for two years before he “got bored” and decided to strike out as an entrepreneur.

His first stab was another “clone” of sorts: it was an emerging market version of Dropbox called Precurio, which grew to have over 200,000 customers. Some of those were Nigerian banks, who started to reach out to ask if Akinlade could help them with software projects. In doing so, he spotted a big gap in the market to build a startup around e-commerce payments covering multiple banks and multiple other players in the payments chain. “I quickly realised that payments here were not the same as in the US and UK,” he said.

Building a product that knits together a number of disparate services  those relationships is not only more challenging for those less familiar with the landscape, but potentially something that they are less interested in doing on their own when the market remains still relatively small. Akinlade said that the total amount processed monthly at Paystack is now at over $20 million — which in larger global terms is still a very small amount of money, and even less so when you consider that what Paystack makes on those transactions is just 1.5 percent.

Still, as the economy gets further up to speed, it’s a region that the big financial services businesses of the world cannot overlook.

“Africa is central to Visa’s long-term growth strategy, especially when you consider how cash is still a primary payment option for millions on the continent,” says Otto Williams, head for strategic partnerships, fintechs and ventures for Visa in Central & Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa (CEMEA), in a statement. “Our investment in Paystack aligns with the kind of investments we look for – those that will help extend our reach into the global commerce ecosystem as it changes and grows, and that will provide mutually beneficial business opportunities.”

Not only is the economy slowly growing, but tech times are most definitely changing, too. Now there have been around nine startups out of Nigeria that have gone through YC. That’s probably still proportionately too few, considering the wider opportunity and number of developers across Africa, but it is a start.

 

While several tech giants have found themselves in President Trump’s crosshairs since he took office, he has just unleashed what looks to be his most sustained attack on Google to date — firing off a couple of tweets at ~5.30am Washington DC time to rail against what he claims is algorithmic bias in the results the search engine serves up if someone types in “Trump News”.

No, the president did not use the four-syllable word “algorithmic”. But presumably he hadn’t even inhaled his first Coke of the day yet.

In his rage tweets, Trump makes the specific allegation that “96% of results on “Trump News” are from National Left-Wing Media”, without citing his source for the claimed datapoint. He then makes the further unsubstantiated claim that: “Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good.”

The Guardian suggests the 96% claim is a reference to an article posted at the weekend by the website PJ Media whose self-described “not-scientific” study of the top 100 Google News results for the search term “Trump” apparently suggested “a pattern of bias against right-leaning content”.

Trump ends the pair of tweets with a warning that the “situation will be addressed” — without specifying exactly what he plans to do. Which is pretty much trademark Trump Twitter policy-on-the-hoofing. Even as the wider political context around his administration, with whispers of impeachment in the air, implies that any loud public complaints by Trump about negative headlines related to himself are an attempt to distract attention from the legal hot waters now boiling around him. But whatevs.

Here are the tweets in all their rage-filled glory:

We’ve reached out to Google for comment.

Ironically, testing out a search for “Trump News” after Trump’s Google flaming tweets, I was served the below result, with the well-known right wing news organization Fox News bagging the very first result in the Top Stories slot, so er… 

It’s unclear whether Trump is aware that Google search results can vary depending on the individual doing the searching. And, well, if Trump is seeing lots of bad news about himself (when he searches for news about himself) let’s just say we’re sure that Freud would have had a field day unpicking the knotted implications of Trump having such navel-gazing obsession with news sources he continually professes to hate and claims are “fake”. But, again, whatevs.

Of course most of what Trump is claiming here is flagrant nonsense — especially as his cancerous catchphrase of ‘fake news’ gets liberally slapped on anything he disagrees with, regardless of whether it’s true or not.

But one thing he’s saying is more or less true: Google is arguably “controlling what we can & cannot see”, given the company has a dominant share of the search market in the West (and a massively dominant one in Europe), and that most Internet users will never click beyond page one of the search results it serves. Or even browse beyond the top few results.

So, essentially, the hierarchies of information that Google’s algorithms create can and do surface or sediment information. Or, in other words, if it’s not on page one of Google it’s barely there.

Another example of Google’s power over what can and cannot be seen: In Europe, in recent years, the company now selectively de-indexes certain search results related to individuals on request (after it has reviewed a request and made a decision), in order to comply with a legal ruling by the EU’s top court (the so-called ‘right to be forgotten‘) — making it less likely that a specific data-point about a non-public individual will be broadly visible in the region.

The fact that a single company has such power over the accessibility of information (and potential to shape opinion) should concern us.

Especially as Google’s algorithmic engines are proprietary black boxes and there is no or little independent oversight of whether its information shaping is fair or even appropriate. (Again in Europe the company has been charged with promoting its own products in shopping related searches over and above rivals — and has had to make changes to the product search results it displays to comply with the antitrust ruling, though it disputes and is legally appealing the regulator’s decision.)

So Trump has at least correctly identified that Google can and does wield huge power via the popularity of its information retrieval platform.

Even as the claim he’s also selectively, self-interestedly amplifying — i.e. ‘96% biased’ — is entirely unsubstantiated, having been based on a single non-scientific survey carried out by an American conservative news blog. So judge appropriately.

Above that, the notion that any commercial company in the West, let alone one so prominent and mainstream as Google, would knowingly and systematically embed political bias into its algorithms to make them less useful for a very large swathe of its potential users is, frankly, ridiculous.

If anything, tech platforms tend to have the opposite problem; They serve up too tightly personalized stuff, risking shrinking users’ ideological horizons by feeding people a political mono-diet. (Which may help explain the Trump phenomenon itself, but I digress.)

Nonetheless, the president has continued to make tech firms his Twitter punchbags. Just last month, for example, he accused Twitter of “shadow banning” Republican users. A claim the company quickly denied, writing: “We do not shadow ban. You are always able to see the tweets from accounts you follow (although you may have to do more work to find them, like go directly to their profile). And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.”

Safe to say, as the headlines about Trump get worse Trump’s rage will grow and the tweets will surely flow.

Simple, an Australia-based business that operates a platform for managing marketing strategies and campaigns, has pulled in $17 million to expand its business in the U.S. and other global markets.

The round was led by BBRC Private Equity, the fund from multi-millionaire retailer Bretty Blundy, with participation from existing backer Perle Ventures.

Unlike most marketing services out there, Simple doesn’t involve itself in execution. It instead is “upstream planning,” which essentially means it helps teams to manage their campaigns by focuses on areas like planning, budgeting, organization, analysis and more. The primary idea is to increase efficiency and value for money from marketing, particularly across the complexity of large and global organizations.

Simple recently tie-up with Microsoft over the launch of its new ‘intelligent market platform’ which, unveiled at Microsoft’s Inspire partners’ conference in Las Vegas, is built on top of the tech giant’s Azure platform. It offers integrations with services like Microsoft Office that are handy for organizations that find themselves working deep in the Microsoft services burrow.

Simple CEO Aden Forrest told TechCrunch in an interview that Simple’s clients span a range of industries, including areas like banking, retail, insurance, gambling. That base is global, but Forrest wants to push on to exploit further opportunities in regional markets.

“This round is about how can we can take what we’ve learned and scale it up and take it global,” he said. “We feel there’s a phenomenal opportunity to take what we’ve learned and push it up through Asia, into the U.S. and across Europe.”

Forrest, who past stints include a spell as head of enterprise sales at Salesforce Australia/New Zealand, said Australia will remain HQ and tech center for Simple, but the firm plans to deploy local sales and marketing teams in markets were it spies opportunities to go deeper. That’s likely to include the U.S. for sure, although the company already operates a distributed customer service team to cater to its global clientele.

When a couple of long-established players are competing hard in any given market, one easy way to expand that market is to simply combine forces. That’s what SmartBear did today when it bought Zephyr, a fellow software testing firm with deep reach into the Atlassian Marketplace. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Zephyr gives SmartBear a tool that includes Zephyr for Jira. Jira is the popular issue tracking software from Atlassian favored by many developers. In fact, Zephyr is the top grossing app in the Atlassian Marketplace, boasting over 18,000 teams using the tool to execute over 40 million tests, according to information supplied by the company.

That kind of reach appealed to SmartBear CEO Justin Teague. The company claims the combined organizations will give them one of the most complete software testing product portfolios in the market. “The acquisition of Zephyr will establish SmartBear as a leader in test management and broaden our portfolio of high-impact, easy-to- use tools…,” he said in a statement.

For Zephyr, getting acquired gives them increased reach as a combined company that they simply couldn’t build on their own. “By leveraging the industry expertise and array of SmartBear solutions, our customers will continue to benefit from the tools they know and love, while now being able to solve additional software development challenges related to building, testing, and monitoring software applications across the UI and API layer,” Zephyr CEO Scott Johnson said in a statement. (In other words, their existing customers should have nothing to worry about after the transition.)

SmartBear launched in 2009 and was acquired by Francisco Partners, a private equity firm in May 2017. Leveraging additional players in a market to build more substantial marketshare is a typical private equity strategy after acquiring a company. It’s the two companies are better than one approach.

Zephyr launched in 2007 and has raised $31 million. Investors include Frontier Ventures, Cervin Ventures and WTI.

Blue is about to become a part of the much larger Logitech. For now, however, the company is going to keep focusing on what it does best: creating low-cost USB microphones for novice podcasters. This week, the California company just added another model to the line.

Yeti Nano shrinks the form factor of Blue’s most popular line into something for more economically accessible. At $99, the new microphone slots in between the Snowball ($49/$69) and the new and even smaller Raspberry ($199).

The price is certainly right on the new microphone. And the design language is great — it really does look exactly like a scale model of the Yeti. There’s a headphone input, so you can hear yourself in real-time and a swiveling stand to position it as you see fit. There are also buttons to toggle between pickup patterns so you can switch between single or omnidirection modes, in situations where you’re going for more of a room tone.

Blue sent me a microphone to try out, and honestly, I have to say I’m pretty disappointed with the thing. The sound quality is tinny and generally lacking, compared to other models I’ve used, including the smaller Blue Raspberry.I’d recommend going with the tried and true Snowball, if you don’t mind a larger model. If portability is the main thing, the Raspberry’s a solid enough selection for sticking in a backpack.

The Shadow Grey model is available now from various retailers. Vivid Blue, Red Onyx and Cubano Gold models are coming soon.

Xiaomi has continued its investment in India after it led a $13.4 million round for fintech startup ZestMoney.

The newly-public Chinese firm previously said it would invest up to $1 billion in India and Indian startups over a five-year period, and this deal follows its maiden India fintech investment in lending platform KrazyBee.

The new capital is an extension to ZestMoney’s recently closed $6.5 million Series A, and it takes the company to $22 million raised to date. Existing backers PayU, Ribbit Capital and Omidyar Network joined Xiaomi in this ‘Series A2’ round.

ZestMoney was founded in 2015 by British entrepreneur Lizzie Chapman, who moved to India in 2011 to head up payday loan startup Wonga’s division in the country. Wonga — which is reportedly close to shutting down — didn’t ultimately pursue that opportunity. After a spell consulting, Chapman reunited with her former Wonga India colleagues Ashish Anantharaman and Priya Sharma and the trio launched ZestMoney.

Despite close ties to Wonga, it’s fair to say that ZestMoney comes at the problem of consumer loans from a totally different direction.

Payday loan companies have (rightly) come under fire for restrictive terms and a business model that is most lucrative when customers pay back late or default on loans.

In contrast, ZestMoney — and other loan services across Asia — are much more consumer-centric. That’s to say that the businesses monetize when consumers pay back their loans, while terms are considerably more customer friendly.

“New age fintech is much more optimistic” than what’s come before, Chapman told TechCrunch in an interview. “The thesis is ‘Behave well and do good things and you’ll get cheaper pricing.'”

The startup also works with banks, rather than against them.

That makes plenty of sense because the idea of giving microloans runs counter to any kind of orthodox thinking at banks in India. Loans of $200-$300 are too small to yield any significant revenue, and banks aren’t in a position go out there and attract thousands of small loans customers that would make it viable.

Then there’s the issue of data. It simply doesn’t exist in the same way it does in the U.S, UK and other Western markets. Few consumers have a credit score, which in conventional banking terms would mean lenders are taking a stab in the dark backing them.

That explanation plus the low volume explains why banks don’t offer the services themselves, but it also goes somehow to understanding why startups like ZestMoney can.

They can essentially act like a funnel for banks, bringing in significant volumes of micro-loan customers by specializing on that area of financing. In ZestMoney’s case, that’s 200,000 applications per month. While by focusing on financial support for single-purchase items — Chapman said electronics, education and learning, and vacations are among the top reasons for loans — the service encourages repeat customers, which in turn provides data which can help vet potential loans.

Added to that, it is also in the common interest within the tech ecosystem to encourage more flexible financing.

Companies like Amazon and Flipkart, which are keen to tap the growth potential of India’s 1.3 billion population, acknowledge that more flexible payment solutions are necessary when the average salary is orders of magnitudes lower than say the U.S. That’s why these e-commerce companies and others work with ZestMoney to subsidize many of the costs around loans. The startup passes that on to consumers, meaning that, often, they get attractive interest-free rates on big-ticket items likes phones or computers.

Chapman concedes that this situation won’t last forever, but she said it helps gain initial reach among some new users and encourage repeat business from existing customers.

Indeed, Xiaomi and ZestMoney have collaborated in a similar way before.

The Chinese firm tapped the startup one year ago to develop its Mi Finance service for Xiaomi customers in India. That relationship, which Chapman said included reciprocal learnings on both sides, led to this week’s investment deal.

ZestMoney is eying a larger round of funding soon as it aims to ramp up its business, and particularly technology. Chapman said the firm is focusing on AI and facial/voice recognition which she believes will enable her company to go beyond tier-one cities in India and reach those who are less comfortable with English and are less experienced in using the internet and digital services.

Planday, the workforce collaboration platform for shift workers, has raised €35 million in new funding. The Series C round is led by SEB Private Equity, with participation from previous backers, including Creandum and Idinvest.

The Danish startup plans to use the additional investment to further develop the cloud-based software and to expand into new markets across Europe and North America. This will also include establishing a U.K.-based technology development hub — which represents a major market for Planday — as well as to grow sales and customer support teams in its London office.

Founded in 2013, Planday has developed a flexible rota scheduling platform that is used by businesses to help manage shift workers. The cloud software enables “real-time, contextual communication” between employees, managers and co-workers in shift-based industries that have been traditionally underserved by tech.

Specifically, employees can communicate with each other, swap shifts and clock in and out. Managers can also create ‘smart’ schedule templates, measure their target revenue compared to wage costs and track hours worked.

Planday is also arguably a platform in the true sense of the word, in terms of integrating with integrating with various third-party software offerings that are used by shift-based businesses. This includes payroll/accounting software from from Intuit and Sage, and EPOS software from Lightspeed and iZettle.

“Our mission is to deliver fully integrated solutions that provide a seamless experience for our customers,” says John Coldicutt, Chief Commercial Officer at Planday.

Meanwhile, Planday says its customer base spans 39 countries, and in the U.K., where it is estimated that 26 percent of all work is shift-based, the startup is growing 250 percent annually, although it doesn’t break out actual numbers.

Another analyst has Huawei overtaking Apple in the global smartphone rankings for the second quarter this year. The latest figures from Gartner put Huawei ahead on sales to end users in Q2.

Overall, Gartner says sales of smartphones to end users grew 2% in the quarter, to reach 374 million units.

The analyst pegs the Chinese smartphone maker with a 13.3% marketshare, saying it sold ~49.8M devices in the quarter, up from 9.8% in the year before quarter — ahead of Apple, which it calculates took an 11.9% marketshare (down from 12.1% in Q2 2017), selling ~44.7M iPhones.

According to Gartner’s figures, Samsung also lost share year-over-year — declining 12.7% in the quarter.

The Galaxy smartphone maker retained its no.1 spot in the rankings, with 19.3% in Q2 (vs 22.6% in the equivalent quarter last year) and ~72.3M devices sold. Though Gartner notes it’s being squeezed by “ever-growing competition from Chinese manufacturers”, while slowing demand for its flagships are squeezing its profitability. Not a happy combination.

In recent years Huawei has been one of a handful of Chinese OEMs bucking the trend of a slowing global smartphone market. And Gartner’s data suggests Huawei’s smartphone sales grew 38.6 per cent in the second quarter.

As we noted earlier this month, when other analysts reported Huawei outstripping Apple on smartphone shipments in Q2, the handset maker has built momentum for its mid-range Honor handset brand while performing solidly at the premium end too, with devices such as the P20 Pro (albeit while copypasting Apple’s iPhone X ‘notch’ screen design in that instance.)

“Huawei continues to bring innovative features into its smartphones and expand its smartphone portfolio to cover larger consumer segments,” said research director Anshul Gupta in a statement. “Its investment into channels, brand building and positioning of the Honor devices helped drive sales. Huawei is shipping its Honor smartphones into 70 markets worldwide and is emerging as Huawei’s key growth driver.”

For Apple the quarter was a flat one (0.9% growth), though that’s to be expected given Cupertino structures its mobile release cycle around a big-bang annual smartphone refresh in the fall, ahead of the holiday quarter, rather than releasing devices throughout the year.

Even so, Gupta noted that Apple is also facing growing competition from Chinese brands, which in turn is amping up pressure on the company to innovate its handsets to keep increasingly demanding consumers happy by delivering “enhanced value” in exchange for the iPhone’s premium price.

And recent reports have suggested Apple is prepping a number of iPhone design changes for fall, including a splash of color.

“Demand for the iPhone X has started to slow down much earlier than when other new models were introduced,” he added, sounding another note of concern for Apple.

Fourth placed Chinese OEM Xiaomi is one device maker putting pressure on longer term players in the smartphone market. In Q2 Gartner reckons the company sold ~32.8M devices, carving itself an 8.8% marketshare — up from 5.8% in the year ago quarter.

The analyst’s data also shows Google’s Android operating system further extending its lead over Apple’s iOS in Q2, securing 88% market share vs 11.9% for iOS.

While the smartphone market is no longer a simple duopoly on the device maker front, with Huawei elbowing past Apple to bag the second spot in the global rankings, it remains very much the opposite story where smartphone operating systems are concerned.

And Gartner’s data now records the ‘other’ category of smartphone OSes at a 0.0% marketshare, down from 0.1% in the year ago quarter…

Google launched its Tez paymen app in India a year ago, and now the company is giving the service major push into retail as it prepares to expand it to other parts of Asia and beyond.

The app itself is being rebranded to Google Pay — bringing it in line with Google’s global payment service, which is available in 20 countries — but there are more tangible updates on their way. Most notably, Google is plotting to turn Tez Google Pay into an all-encompassing payment app for India.

The service started out in bank-based payments before adding bill and utility payments and messaging, but now Google is planning an extended push into retail, both online and offline. Economic Times recently reported on the rebrand and expansion.

The service already supports payments with some 2,000 apps and websites, including Goibibo and RedBus, but it is adding to that number and planning ‘deep’ integration with partners such as Uber and ticketing service BookMyshow. Google is also focusing on offline, and it said it is in the process of adding in-store payment support with a range of retail brands that will include Big Bazaar, e-Zone, and FBB.

Tez competes with dedicated payment services like Paytm and Mobikwik, and also WhatsApp — the Facebook-owned service that is India’s top messaging app but has struggled to win approval to launch an upcoming payment service due to concerns around its lack of a local office.

Already, Google’s service has made progress. The Tez app has pulled in 55 million downloads, and Google said it has racked up 750 million transactions with an annual run rate of over $30 billion. That, it said, has motivated it to look at overseas expansion opportunities.

Beyond the retail push, the service formerly known as Tez will also expand to cover micro-loans, bringing it into direct competition with startups like ZestMoney — which just closed an investment from Xiaomi this week.

Google said it has partnered with a number of India-based banks — including HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Federal Bank, and Kotak Mahindra Bank — to offer “pre-approved” loans to customers “in a matter of seconds” through the Google app.

These will be smaller than typical loans, especially those in the West. Loans on services like ZestMoney typically cover one-off purchases like electronics, education fees and more, CEO Lizzie Chapman told TechCrunch in a recent interview.

Finally, Google also plans to expand Tez Google Pay overseas. That means both adding Tez features to the Google Pay service worldwide, and taking the India-based service into new parts of Asia. That’ll require plenty of localization since the Indian version is heavily based around the country’s UPI payment system — which doesn’t translate overseas — but it’s a step in the right direction.

Google isn’t saying too much about which markets it might move into but you’d imagine Southeast Asia, which as plenty of similarities with India, will be top of mind.

Note: The original version of this story was updated to correct that the integration with banks doesn’t use Tez payment data to assess user creditworthiness.