Digital payment failures rise during the pandemic

Accenture, the global consulting and IT services firm suggests banks to review their payments application as many use legacy platforms that hinder scalability and lead to integration challenges.

Complaints related to digital transactions form a major part of the total complaints received by the banks

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Technical declines or transaction failures of digital payments in India increased during the pandemic. Accenture estimates that payment failures for multiple banks have now climbed up to 2% from less than 1% before the pandemic.

"This is due to the larger volume of digital transactions, especially smaller ticket size ones," said Sonali Kulkarni, financial services practice lead at Accenture India in an interaction with The Hindu . These declines happen due to system errors, and network and bank IT infrastructure issues, and they pose a key challenge for digital payments, she added.

The global consulting and IT services firm suggests banks to review their payments application as many use legacy platforms that hinder scalability and lead to integration challenges. Banks and financial institutions need to review their payments integration architecture and identify weaknesses in real-time applications that enable 24x7 payment service.

Banks also need to transform to cloud-based technology to achieve superior resiliency and low latency as they cope with demand surges. The consulting firm sees certainty of payment and a quick recourse in case of transaction failure as a major challenge in adoption of digital payments in India.

"Currently, the chargeback [or payment reversal] process in digital payments is not very robust," Sonali said.

The other challenges are inadequate availability of point of sale (PoS) devices with merchants and lower card acceptance infrastructure that rarely extends beyond tier 1 and tier 2 cities in India. Complaints related to digital transactions form a major part of the total complaints received by the banks, according to Accenture.

The consulting and IT services firm notes that AI-driven complaint resolution bots could automatically resolve and respond to customer queries, reducing costs of operating customer service centres.

Banks can also deploy voice bots to proactively call a customer in case of a transaction failure. "Besides reducing complaints it can also enhance customer experience," Sonali noted.