Agoda: Diagnose Rising Failure Rates for Wallet and UPI Payments and Plan Fixes

You are a product manager at Agoda. Newer payment methods such as digital wallets and UPI are failing more and more often. How would you find out why, and what would you do to bring the failures down? ```hint Find where the payment dies Break a wallet or UPI payment into its steps and look at which step, and which failure reasons, account for the increase before guessing at causes. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - How is a failure counted: per payment attempt or per booking, and does it include payments the user abandons or that stay pending? - Did the rise start suddenly or build over weeks, and have card failure rates stayed flat over the same period? - Is the increase spread across all wallets, UPI apps and markets, or concentrated in a few providers or countries? - Has the share of bookings paid with these methods grown at the same time, for example through a promotion or a new market launch? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - Pinning down the failure definition, size and timing, and ruling out measurement artifacts - A funnel view of the payment flow with failure reasons, segmented by provider, platform, market, amount and user type - Internal and external hypotheses ordered by fit with the data, each with a concrete check - Short-term mitigation that protects bookings, plus longer-term fixes with providers and partners - Metrics to track recovery, with guardrails on fraud, duplicate charges and payment costs ### Follow-up Questions - The data shows most of the new failures are UPI payments that time out before the user approves them. What would you change? - How would you decide whether to automatically retry a failed wallet payment through a backup payment provider? - Which alerts would you set up so that a rise like this is caught within hours instead of weeks?