Downtime Notification

Downtimes are common occurrences in the payments ecosystem impairing the ability to make payments during the affected time. In current scenarios, downtimes are primarily caused because multiple banks have not scaled their payment infrastructure to support the fast-paced growth of India's digital payment adoption. On the other hand, Indian customers have 1-2 payment instruments with which they make their payments and have a very high stickiness to them. If there is a downtime for a particular payment instrument, customer's attempts to make a payment via the instrument that is suffering from degradation and hence which is most likely to fail. The customer does this because he does not have information about the downtime and hence cannot change his behaviour. Apart from the revenue loss for a merchant, these can sometimes also turn into customer's escalation with the merchant's customer service or social media platforms.

To solve the above problems, Paytm has come up with a downtime notification that ensures that merchants are notified of the latest downtimes. Merchant can use these notifications for various purposes like:

1. Nudge the customer to use a different payment instrument increasing the chances of a successful payment
2. Display a list of downtime (current/historical) to their customer to avoid customer's from raising any CST ticket
3. Historical payment analysis conducted by the merchant

Currently, we are restricted to sending notifications on bank downtimes only. In future, we notify all services extended by Paytm like - APIs, Checkout Flows, dashboard, APP etc. Current types of notification are with scenarios are provided below:

1. Planned Downtime Notification -  When banks take a scheduled break for maintenance purposes. This notification is triggered twice - 24 hours prior to notification and just before planned downtime
2. Unplanned Downtime Notification - When we witness a dip in the performance for a particular payment instrument. We have categorized this type of downtime as per the following severity levels.
   1. Fluctuation - When the performance of payment option falls by 45% to 60% compared to their average performance.
   2. Moderate -  When the performance of payment option falls by 60% to 80% compared to their average performance.
   3. Severe - When the performance of payment option falls by more than 80% compared to their average performance.
3. Recovery Notifications - Notifications are triggered once the performance has recovered after the degradation of planned downtime and unplanned downtime.

Following downtime notifications are currently available :

You can use the API, configure the Webhooks and e-mail ids to be notified for each type of downtimes, and plan the remediation steps accordingly. 

1. Notifications on E-Mail
   1. We provide the functionality to send notifications over an E-Mail. To consume the notifications on E-Mail, you need to enable the preference in the Paytm system. Reach out to the helpdesk team or KAMs in case of any queries
   2. The maximum number of e-mails is 5 against any merchant
2. Notification through API
   1. We provide the functionality to send notifications through API. To consume the notifications through the API, you need to enable the preference in the Paytm system.
   2. There is 2 type of APIs. One is to get the historical downtime data and another one is for the current downtime data.
      • Fetch current downtime API
      • Fetch historical downtime API
3. Notification via Webhook
   We provide the functionality to send notifications via webhook. To consume the notifications via webhook, you need to enable the preference in the Paytm system.
4. Downtime communication on the dashboard

   This bank downtime view is available for all PG merchants on UMP under the Bank Downtime tab. It consists of the following views:

   • The summary view gives the total downtimes on each payment source.
   • The list view gives the list of downtimes witnessed in the duration selected by the merchant.
   • The detail view captures the minute-level performance of the downtime entity around the downtime duration. Additionally, it captures the historic performance up to 60 days inform of the bread crumb chart.