Where the money goes: the whole truth about mobile payments

    This is the case: recently, German Gref called one of the Facebook users and thanked for damaging the reputation of Sberbank, which the former minister, as you know, now manages.

    And the damage turned out to be considerable: the post of user Marina Kornakova about how Sber steals money from her customers, gained more than 2700 likes. 3,700 people shared it with their friends. Gref did not call, however, to threaten a lawsuit. On the contrary, he said that the bank will work on errors, and even issued his personal email for the future.

    Missing payments is without a doubt one of the most painful topics for the entire financial industry, it does not matter whether it is a solid bank, a network of payment terminals or an innovative financial startup. Forums and social networks are strewn with angry posts about stolen money. It seems like this:



    For us, the payment service UBANK , this topic is also quite sensitive - for obvious reasons. Sometimes it seems that some customers who encounter problems consider us scammers who, in two weekends for beer and “Nirvana”, got a payment service and now millions are welded on gullible simpletons.

    Believe it or not, we honestly try to do a convenient thing that can facilitate the financial side of life for smartphone users. Therefore, today we decided to go through the minefield and, at the risk of being blown up, tell the whole truth about where the money disappears.

    From this post you will learn why your money can freeze, what we are doing to prevent this from happening, and why, contrary to stereotypes, operations through a mobile application are much safer than, for example, transferring via terminals. Let's start over: why can there be a problem with the translation at all? There are three types of reasons for this.





    1. Error in the details


    Although a little something is wrong, all the bumps usually fall on the payment service, in many cases the problem is the mistakes that the users themselves make by filling in the details incorrectly. According to our statistics, this is the cause of more than fifty percent of suspended payments. Moreover, if the bank where you transfer the money is involved in the instant payment system (Visa Money Transfer or Mastercard MoneySend), then nothing terrible will likely happen. Information about a failed payment will be available instantly - and the money will be returned to you right away.

    Problems begin for those whose banks are not keeping pace with progress, and there are not so few of them, especially in the provinces. They process payments in the old-fashioned way - through an offline gateway. That is, first all requests are collected in one place, then - usually once a day - the bank downloads and processes them. Thus, the error is not detected immediately. The fact is that in this case, transactions are carried out like ordinary bank transfers - and they take time. Probably, many people replenished cards through transaction officers at the bank, and they know that the money actually appears on the account in one or two days. And this is provided that you replenish the card at the branch of the bank that issued it, and do not transfer to another bank.

    2. Card limits


    Another common case, again, has little to do with the quality of the payment service. It happens that money does not reach the addressee due to existing restrictions on cards - for example, limits on transfers from card to card. In most cases, this threshold is now 30 thousand rubles a month, but in fact it is determined by the final service provider, that is, the bank itself. Again, if the entire transfer chain goes through an online gateway, then information about exceeding the limit will be transmitted instantly, the payment will be refunded. Problems will arise for those who are left overboard with progress and forced to operate through offline gateways. If you replenished a card through the terminal of a payment system for 5000 rubles, and then try to replenish through UBANK another 30 thousand, then you will exceed your limit. But only the bank that issued the card can calculate this, which has information about all payments. However, if he works through an offline gateway, then information from him will not come to us right away.

    3. Technical failure


    Of course, it’s not always the fault of the carelessness of the client, who either drove the wrong details, or did not notice that he had exceeded the limits of his bank (or, as in the case of Sberbank, was simply not notified in time about the limitations of the service). Sometimes technical failures also occur. And then money really "hangs" in zero gravity. But this does not mean that they were stolen.

    Whatever the reason, the payment could not be taken like that and simply cannot. After all, the payment system is not the Bermuda Triangle.


    It’s just that error information can travel the payment chain for more than one day. There is no short description of financial infrastructure.

    Suppose you want to pay via UBANK to your Internet service provider from your card linked to your account. How does this happen?

    1 . First of all, we make a request to the service provider, checking the possibility of making a payment (is it possible, in principle, to spend money on the specified details).

    2 . If we realized that you can transfer money, we send a request to the acquiring bank and reserve the amount necessary for payment on the card.

    3. Money is reserved. We are sending a payment request. In most cases, it is successful and immediately receives the final successful status. If the payment gives an error, we will return the funds to the card.

    An important nuance: payment services, as a rule, make payments not directly, but through intermediary aggregators. After all, there are hundreds of companies to which users want to transfer money. To create a complete base and keep it up to date is another task. It is precisely the aggregator who decides it: his business is to collect information about various payees and “sell” it to a payment service. Moreover, many aggregators cannot track the entire market, and then close their “white spots”, turning to other aggregators.

    Therefore, when making a payment, money often makes a small trip: from the user to us, from us to the aggregator, from him to another aggregator, and finally to the bank of the recipient. This path may take some time. Here lies the reason for all the troubles: if something went wrong and it was not immediately known about it thanks to the online gateway, then the return trip of money along this chain can take several days, sometimes more than a week. However, even if the worst thing happened - the information about the failed payment was "lost" - with a monthly reconciliation between all participants in the process, it pops up, and sooner or later the money will return to where it came from. Therefore, money cannot simply disappear.

    Users write in social networks: money was stolen! But when the money does come back, few people spend time reporting it on their blog.





    This does not mean that we believe that freezing customers' money is in the order of things. On the contrary, each such case is for us a file, which we are trying to resolve as soon as possible. As soon as we receive confirmation from our partners that the operation did not pass, we immediately return the payment to the client, without waiting for other formalities. By the way, this money is actually returned to us at UBANK much later.

    It seems to us that our policy in this sense is much more loyal than that of many other companies that make payments. For example, mobile operators with payments less than 500 rubles do not understand at all until you write a statement and bring it personally to the post office.

    Some people are distrustful of mobile payment services. Although in fact they do not differ from banking applications or payment terminals, which are still extremely popular in Russia: everyone who makes payments uses the same infrastructure for transferring money and faces the same problems. Almost all payment services work through aggregators, no matter mobile or not.

    Moreover, contrary to stereotypes, transferring money through the terminal at the station or in the store around the corner is always more risky than through an application such as UBANK .

    If something goes wrong - for example, electricity is cut off and the device eats your bills - go ahead and prove that the terminal was jamming your cash. And certainly no one will return any money to you until it has been collected. But many terminals are not collected more often than once a week.

    When you do not use cash and pay only by electronic means, money simply cannot disappear. And if you are our customer of UBANK (or another similar service), we at least know who to return the money to if something goes wrong.

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