A string of system glitches and service outages at major fintech services has raised concerns about stability. With simple payment and remittance services now established as everyday financial infrastructure, there are calls to strengthen risk management and consumer protection systems in the fintech industry.

According to the fintech industry on Sunday, Naver Pay saw an error at around 5 p.m. on June 4 in which the app screen did not display properly when launched on some Android devices. Some users saw only a blank white screen and could not use the service.

In a notice, Naver Pay said it was urgently checking an issue in which the app screen was not displayed when the Pay app was launched on some Android devices. It later completed measures by distributing an updated version of the app.

Earlier, Naver Pay also experienced user inconvenience in February, when a payment failure error was restored after 5 hours.

At Toss, an error occurred involving actual fund transfers. For about 38 minutes from around 2 p.m. on June 1, the same transfer was executed twice in accounts of some users who had set up automatic transfers. About 15,000 users were affected, and the amount of duplicate withdrawals was about 2.14 billion won.

Toss believes a system error occurred during the automatic transfer processing. It completed measures to prevent recurrence immediately after recognising the issue. It also made an upfront lump-sum payment of the duplicate withdrawal amounts using its own funds to reduce user inconvenience.

At Kakao Pay, an access outage occurred early this year. Service access was disrupted for about 29 minutes, and Kakao Pay explained that the issue was caused by a temporary system error and that it normalised the service afterward.

While the causes and scope of each incident differ, the fact that errors continue to occur at services of the three major fintech companies is weighing on the industry.

As simple payment and remittance services have spread across everyday financial transactions, repeated app access outages or payment errors are bound to be taken more sensitively by users.

Fintech companies have been expanding their influence as financial platforms on the back of rapid service expansion and growth in their user bases. But as payment, remittance and automatic transfer services have become a larger part of everyday finance, the ripple effects of outages have grown compared with the past. These repeated errors can weigh on platform credibility.

In and outside the industry, there are calls for fintech companies to strengthen system stability management and outage response systems in line with the size of their user bases. Some also say systems and internal standards need to be supplemented together so that user notifications and damage relief procedures can operate consistently when outages occur.

A financial industry official said simple payment and remittance services are no longer add-on services but also a core part of everyday financial transactions. The official said that as user bases have grown, the fintech industry needs to manage consumer protection systems at a higher level.

Another official stressed that alongside discussions on institutional improvements, the fintech industry should continue investing in IT infrastructure and strengthening internal control systems. The official said it is important to eliminate outages entirely, but what matters most is advancing prevention and response systems that can minimise customer losses when outages occur.