Categories
Uncategorized

Rent-seeking can ruin even the most elegant digital experiences

Possibly the worst-designed payments experience I know of, at the recent U2 concert in Bombay:

…customers were required to register (with a name, phone number etc) and then pre-load the card. It was announced that the pre-loading could be done exclusively via a particular payments app. Once this step was completed, customers would need to tap their cards at any of the physical kiosks at the venue in order to update the card with the online balance…


… food and beverages could only be purchased at the concert venue using the RFID card, no refunds would be available and that there would be physical kiosks at the venue for topping up the cards…

To load Rs.1000 into the wallet, the customer was charged a fee of Rs.100. On this fee, there was a GST of 18%, so the payment went up to Rs.1118. This was a total cost to the consumer of 11.8%, as compared with paying cash. 

To add insult to injury, the money left on the card was not refundable. What was not spent would be confiscated by the payments vendor. Customers were thus required to estimate their expenses without knowing the prices of the goods up front. 

Despite having taken the trouble of registering and pre-loading the card prior to the concert, she now had to stand in two long queues at two separate kiosks: one to first update the card so that the online transaction of Rs 500 was fed into the card, and the other to top-up the card with Rs 500 so that she could make her F&B purchases… payment counters soon became longer than the queues at the F&B counters.

And finally

the systems at the kiosks for updating the registered RFID cards stopped working… The mobile data network crashed at the venue with thousands of people trying to access it… the merchants inside the stadium stood firm, in unison, in refusing to sell goods to the customers using any other payment mechanism.

This when we now have UPI. And a plethora of apps that implement it, a well-known way to quickly scan QR-codes to pay. It smacks of rent-seeking by a monopoly.

The problem with this private license-Raj behaviors is it puts people off digital payments in general. There are possibly hundreds now for whom this is the definition of a digital payment experience, and who’d much rather prefer using cash in the future.