By Muneeb Naqeeb
As the government of India visions to transform India into a digitally empowered society “Faceless, paperless, cashless” the digital transactions are going up with each passing day. According to statista.com, In financial year 2021, around 44 billion digital payments were recorded across India. This was an increase compared to the previous three years.
But in Kashmir on Sunday morning 01-05-2022, just two days prior to Eid ul Fitr, the online transaction platform of Jammu And Kashmir Bank: Mpay; collapsed, and thus, caused major inconvenience to its users all over.
To get the required money for the festival, many customers were seen queuing up in long lines outside the ATMs of branches in different areas to collect the cash for celebrating the festival.
“I had to buy confectionery and bakery items for Eid, but my Mpay wasn’t working due to which I had to locate my nearest ATM to withdraw cash, and that is what I did. The long lines at the ATM reminded me of the demonetisation era,” said Yaseen Ahmad, fumingly.
Many of the angry customers took on to popular social networking sites like Twitter to address this issue as they scathingly tweeted their bitter experience.
People rushed into ATMs and their respective Bank branches to get the cash required. Some of these banks were depleted of cash by late afternoon causing more trouble to the people. According to the official spokesperson of J&K Bank, around Rs. 323 Cr. cash was withdrawn from their myriad of ATM machines on the Eve of Eid Ul Fitr.
“I have been in the queue for more than 40 minutes, and just got to know there is no more cash here, they have called the head office to get more cash,” said a customer while waiting for his turn to use the ATM.
The reason for this inconvenience according to an employee of J&K Bank (who wished not to be named), is the platform on which the Banking app is built upon, being outdated “The bank has not made a good app which can rival the mbanking apps of HDFC or ICICI or even Bank of India. Despite the traffic of online transactions increasing enormously, the bank still has relied on an app that is severely outdated. There also is no functionality for non-account holders to use the app for credit cards or account opening like there is in ICICI bank and for it to compete against the other successful banks, it needs to roll out a new app that not only caters to the needs of its customers by providing basic functions uninterruptedly but also reels in prospective customers.” he said
Some users asked why is it, that the older version of the app (Mpay) is working fine for some users and not working for others. “My father uses the older version of Mpay, which in my opinion is better than newer Mpay Delight, why is it that i am unable to use the previous app?” asked Musaib, a shopkeeper.
“As soon as you install Mpay Delight app the data from the older version of the is transferred to this new version of app, and the old app becomes defunct. Since the older version is still available on Play store thus users that have pre-installed the older version of the app can use it, but no new update will roll out for Mpay and eventually no will be able to use it.” said a Jammu and Kashmir bank employee.
