Friday 2 October 2015

Yet Another Banking Innovation Blooper

I was happy to see Kotak Bank's one time use online card, though it's not a novel product; as HDFC had earlier had this product called NetSafe,  I used it quite extensively, as it worked fine, however a few months ago, it stopped working, and never came back online.

Since, I had used this kind of product and found it very handy, I tried to use it. The card was generated instantly and the limit money blocked promptly.

I attempted to use it on Big Basket checkout, but the card was refused by the payment gateway, PayU, I retried it after half an hour with the same result.


I then tried it with loading the wallet of Airtel Money, but this too failed as well!

I see a pattern here, of failed innovations in banking domain recently in India. see my previous blog on ICIC innovations.

My hypothesis on this fast paced failed innovation is that it is driven by panic setting in by multiple new licenses.

Anyways, with Tokenization support provided by NPCI Unified Payment API (UPI), will make it obsolete anyways.