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Informist, Thursday, Sept. 25, 2025

 

MUMBAI – Customer support and services was the most significant concern voiced in negative reviews by users on payment, lending and banking applications, according to a study titled 'The Untold Story of FinTech Customers' Experience' by the Reserve Bank of India's staff published in its monthly bulletin for September, released Wednesday. Comments in the article do not represent the views of the central bank.

 

"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," the paper said. Under the category of customer support and services, delayed or lack of responses to electronic mails, calls and queries through chat were the key issues raised, the paper said. 

 

The study analysed 5.69 million customer reviews of 107 financial technology applications in India, of which 61 were alternative lending applications, 25 were payments applications, and 21 were banking tech applications. The study used machine learning techniques to assess sentiment and concerns in the Indian financial technology ecosystem, the paper said. Among the negative reviews, other issues mentioned by customers included lack of an effective mechanism for escalation of issues, and inadequate solutions to reach out to human staff for resolution of critical difficulties. Users flagged poor management of technical issues and loan repayment grievances, coupled with automated responses to the problems reported. 

 

The study found technical and functional issues of fintech applications to be another major concern, especially for payment applications. The paper specified issues faced, including frequent software shut down, inability to login, and and errors in know-your-customer verification issues. Lags in software and compatibility problems were other technological problems voiced by customers in reviews. The topic modelling analysis did not bring out prevalence of fraudulent apps in the ecosystem due to the removal of fraudulent lending apps from application stores by the RBI and and self-regulatory organisations, the paper said. 

 

Overall results of the study showed generally positive user experience, the paper said. Among the three sectors under study, applications with payment or lending as their primary business were more likely to get installed than banking applications, the study said. 

 

Among other findings, reviews on fintech applications "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", the paper said. "Further, there also exists a positive imbalance in FinTech reviews, which means that the share of positive reviews received by most of the apps is higher than the share of negative reviews."  End

 

Reported by Cassandra Carvalho

Edited by Avishek Dutta

 

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