Payment, lending apps more likely to get installed than banking apps: RBI article

Mumbai, Sep 24 (PTI) Positive user experience in India's FinTech ecosystem is mainly driven by app market share, updates, and data privacy policies, with payment and lending apps more likely to get installed than banking apps, according to a study published in the RBI's latest Bulletin.

Understanding user experience is crucial for advancing FinTech innovations and shaping customer-centric policies, said the article titled ' The Untold Story of FinTech Customers' Experience' published in the Reserve Bank's September Bulletin.

Among the three sectors under study -- payment, lending and banking, 11 apps with payment or lending as their primary business are more likely to be installed than banking, it added.

"The likelihood of receiving a review per unique FinTech app installation is 0.54 per cent, marginally higher for payment and lending apps (0.6 per cent) compared to banking technology apps," the article said.

Although the apps under study have received around six million reviews during the last two years, providing ample opportunities to understand the major customer concerns, it added.

"FinTech reviews are polarised in India, with around 20 per cent of total reviews belonging to one star and 67 per cent of total reviews belonging to five stars. Thus, these extreme reviews account for almost 87 per cent of total reviews in the FinTech ecosystem," said the article authored by Ashish Khobragade, Sakshi Awasthy and Rakhe Balachandran, the Department of Economic and Policy Research (DEPR), Reserve Bank of India (RBI), and research intern in DEPR, Mantisha.

In terms of sentiment analysis, it said the numbers may vary.

Notably, the article said 61.7 per cent of all FinTech apps studied received a share of positive reviews in the 50 to 80 per cent range. A smaller share of apps (7 per cent) received less than 20 per cent positive reviews.

"Thus, the distribution of mean positive reviews is slightly negatively skewed in the Indian FinTech ecosystem," it added.

Among the FinTech apps that were below the overall positive average, 58 per cent belong to the payments sector, 22 per cent belong to alternative lending, and 20 per cent belong to the banking tech sector.

The authors said over 5.69 million reviews, spanning April 2022 to August 2024, were collected, along with app-specific data like unique installations, review counts and major app updates. The open-access Python package google-playscraper was used to extract app reviews.

It further said the most positive emotion associated with the Indian FinTech ecosystem is trust across all sectors, followed by anticipation of a good outcome and joy.

Across sectors, around 50 per cent of customers have expressed trust in the FinTech ecosystem.

Among the negative emotions, the most expressed emotion is anger, followed by sadness, fear and disgust.

The article said negative reviews can function as an effective feedback mechanism from customers to FinTechs, and can also provide macro-level insights to policymakers.

The article said major customer concerns across segments relate to customer support and service, app functionality and technical issues, and loan-related issues in application and approval, credit limit and credit score.

"A major concern identified across sectors is customer support and service (CSS), which emerges as the most significant concern for banking technology customers, and the second-largest for payment tech and alternative lending tech users," according to the article.

Within this category, key issues include unresponsive customer support, such as delayed or no responses to emails, calls, or chat queries; lack of effective escalation mechanisms and inadequate resolution for critical or urgent issues or difficulties in reaching out to a human agent; rude or unprofessional behaviour from customer support staff, it added.

The central bank said the views expressed in the Bulletin article are those of the authors and do not represent the views of the Reserve Bank of India. PTI NKD BAL BAL