Challenges Indian developers face in building payment systems

This is the summary of the discussion on this topic in a meetup organised for FinTech developers by Eko Developer Community on Discord.
If you prefer listening over reading, here's the recording on YouTube.

Payment system challenges in India, a poem (thanks to ChatGPT)

The challenges in building payment systems in India,
Are many and varied, it's true,
From lack of infrastructure, to lack of trust,
The road ahead is long, and fraught with obstacles too.

There's the issue of accessibility,
Ensuring that everyone has a way to pay,
And the problem of security,
To keep the funds safe, each and every day.

Then there's the challenge of scale,
To handle the vast numbers of transactions, with ease,
And the need for interoperability,
To allow for seamless movement of funds, with the least of fees.

But despite these obstacles, we persevere,
Working tirelessly, to overcome each one,
For we know that in the end, our efforts will be rewarded,
As a better payments system, for India, will have been won.

Now that you have a good overview, let me pick 4 specific things from the perspective of developers

What are the key challenges faced in building payment system in India?

• Complexity: Dealing with multiple Banks APIs and their changes
• Docs: Poor quality of documentation in Banks API
• Transaction Status: Ambiguous transaction statuses provided by Bank APIs
• Responsibility: Need of being highly reliable and robust

India is one of the fastest growing economy. Payments play a vital role here. Specially payments to its major population that comes from non-urban areas

More than 75% people in India come from non-urban areas (villages, small towns, etc.) and many of them don't have access to banking facilities as people in urban areas have

Complexity: Dealing with multiple Banks APIs and their changes

In a big country like India, building payments for the audience that comes from non-urban areas means dealing with multiple banks. Although you'll have the challenge in dealing with banks but let's focus only on developers' challenges for this article. As a developer, you need to integrate with multiple banks APIs. All with different standards. It requires you to learn about multiple such APIs and then keep a track of changes and keep updating your codebase.

Docs: Poor quality of documentation in Banks API

As an Indian developer building payment system, more than often you find that the quality of documentation of banks is not that great. It leads to lots of time wasted and a risk of making mistakes. This is improving but not at the pace which a developer in 2022 would expect.

Transaction Status: Ambiguous transaction statuses provided by Bank APIs

Although we can talk about a lot in terms of API quality of the banks but let's focus single most important thing for a customer expect from Banks API - unambiguous transaction status update in time. And many Banks fail you in that. They provide transaction status that are hard to understand, and they do not reach in time, while the customers keep waiting. This leads to lot of back and forth energy wasted by the customer as well as the payment system support.

Responsibility: Need of being highly reliable and robust as you are dealing with money

Think about a poor family who awaits the payment of INR 1000 ($12) from a family member who works as a labor in some other city. If they don't get it, they don't have food to eat or do other essential things. They will be helpless. At this point, a developer of the payment system is not coding just another web app, it is a big responsibility that your code is functional, reliable, and scalable. It takes motivation and true empathy for the customers to pull it off.

Conclusion
Indian developers face challenges with complexity, documentation, bank API quality, etc. in building payment systems. Of course, it is not as easy as building yet another web app. It takes motivation, knowledge and empathy to enable payments for Bharat. Together, it can be made easier. Eko Developer Community aims to solve that. The next community meetup is around the corner.