An outage in just about any system is an inconvenience at least, and could be a complete calamity at worst.

Even something as an email loss or just a Facebook outage can slow operations for businesses or hurt regular people too. Recently, JPMorgan Chase customers took an outage of their own in the online and mobile payments arenas.

Several services went down with the outage, including online bill pay and the Chase QuickPay mobile payments service, which handles the increasingly popular peer-to-peer (P2P) payments service. The services cut out around four in the afternoon, but were brought back about 8:30.

Word from Chase spokesman Tom Kelly noted that the company’s ATM system wasn’t affected, nor were either debit or credit card systems. An unknown quantity of users also reported seeing N/A  on their balances, though that wasn’t universal. Kelly further cited a technology issue’s that the company was working on as reason behind the sudden and protracted outage.

Four and a half hours without bill pay and mobile payments isn’t exactly good news, but for most, it was a safe bet that disruption was minimal. For Chase, however, who lost out on a bunch of payments to process and cash accordingly, as well as a loss of face in the market, the losses are much greater

However, what this shows us more than anything is that mobile payments systems are far from impervious to both outside threat and operational issues. There’s a lot of room here for improvement, and organizations like Chase need to make sure systems are running with as much uptime as possible.

Mobile payments systems must be reliable in order to continue catching on to any degree, and the more downtime the system experiences, the less likely users will step in.

Of course, any system requires a certain amount of downtime, and issues are unavoidable. Chase kept its users informed, and that helps provide value; sometimes outages are unavoidable, but responding quickly and clearly does help bolster a brand’s reputation.

Chase may have taken some losses here, but its quick response and transparent communication with users should have ultimately salvaged the situation for the most part and given users reason to stick around.

For more information how to avoid downtime contact Quant ICT Group, www.quant-ict.nlinfo@quant-ict.nltel: +31880882500

Source: Paymentweek, Steven Anderson