Tag: mobile payment apps

The largest mobile wallet in India has been delisted for iPhone and iPad due to technical problems.

At a time when mobile payments have taken off explosively in India, the Paytm app has been delisted for iPhone and iPad users. The Apple App Store no longer offers the mobile wallet after Paytm found technical issues such as bugs. The company worked hard to produce an update to iron out the problems and was awaiting Apple’s approval at the time of the writing of this article.

The temporary removal of the mobile payments application occurred on the heels of a service outage.

The Paytm app had been experiencing issues. The entire service was behaving oddly last week and for a stretch before then. It suffered a serious outage and then triggered a range of issues for days following, even after the mobile wallet was taken down from the App Store. That said, many people were quite surprised when the application was entirely delisted.

The reason is that while all updates for iPhone and iPad apps require Apple’s approval, the older version of the application will typically remain available for download until the updates receive the nod. In this case, the updates were awaiting approval and the entire app was taken down.

The reason for the Paytm app removal was not because Apple decided to intervene and delist it.

Instead, it was the choice of Paytm to take its mobile wallet down. According to a spokesperson from the company, “We have currently removed the app from the App Store to stop adding incremental new users to our existing base.”

The company then expanded on the statement by making a blog post that read “Today we found a bug in our iOS App where certain app users were not able to pay thereby hanging their app. Soon the system logged them out preventing them from further accessing their account.”

Currently, Paytm has more than 170 million registered users. The version of the app that runs on Android and the web-based platform are working without any problems at all, says the company. It continues to be available to download at Google Play and for browser users.

This may be good news for Android device users as the Paytm app and other mobile wallets have become a necessity for millions of people for the last couple of months. Ever since India decided to take some of its larger currency notes out of circulation – which are now being replaced with new versions – there has been a shortage of cash and consumers have needed to look to other methods of paying for products and services.

A new ACI Worldwide report has shown that there are two major priorities for these payment apps.

The results of a new ACI Worldwide survey have now been released and, within them, it has been revealed that retailers considering mobile wallet apps are most interested in two major issues: security and the ability to use rewards programs.

That said, between those leading issues, it is the mobile security features that tops the list.

Among the retailers who responded to the survey, two out of every three said that the security aspect of mobile wallet apps is their leading concern. This demand from retailers for mobile payments solutions that provide adequate security should help to assuage some of the concerns that consumers have also expressed with regards to adopting these new types of transaction technologies.

That said, beyond security, there were a number of other expectations retailers had for mobile wallet apps.

Seventy two percent of the surveyed retailers said that security was their top issue for their mobile commerce apps, in general, but when it came to payments, that figure rose to 75 percent. However, just slightly less – 71 percent – said that they wanted the integration of loyalty options into m-commerce apps, while 55 percent were concerned about that issue with mobile payments apps. Another 55 percent said it was important to be able to achieve seamless ordering through the use of the shopping applications but for wallet apps, that was seen as important only among 46 percent of the respondents.

According to the ACI Worldwide vice president, product line manager, Lynn Holland, in the company’s release on the study, “The proliferation of retail digital channels demonstrates the trend that ‘clicks upstage bricks,’ but even consumers shopping at traditional brick and mortar stores are increasingly using in-store browsing capabilities, which puts the power of information in sales associates’ and consumers’ hands.”

Holland also pointed out that no matter the channel, the results of the research indicated that over m-commerce and mobile wallets, payment security remains a top concern among retailers considering the use of this tech, especially in issues such as point-to-point encryption and tokenization.