Along with the depositors, PhonePe is one of the companies that got shocked after RBI’s announcement to limit Yes Bank withdrawal to Rs 50,000 till April 3. Taking actions overnight, the PhonePe team began transitioning the UPIs from YES Bank to ICICI, with the help of the National Payments Corporation of India. ICICI is the new UPI partner for Phonepe and all its users can continue to use their UPI with the @ybl handles.
UPI payments fell 40 percent on the day of the Yes Bank crisis, ET reported. PhonePe, which processes 20 million transactions on an average day, was down for most of Friday, with peer-to-peer payments, online merchant payments, and in-store QR code-based payments all facing issues. For those who don’t know, Yes Bank contributed big in India’s UPI payments. In January only, it had processed 39% of the 1.3 billion UPI transactions in the country. A large portion of these was done through PhonePe, which counted around 570 million transactions.
Seeing the urgency of the situation, PhonePe managed to get their systems up and running very quickly- late Friday night, PhonePe said that all its services were operational, which meant that on Saturday, UPI payments on PhonePe were back to normal by switching backend from Yes Bank to ICICI Bank.
“Friday was an extraordinarily difficult situation with little precedence. We are grateful to RBI, NPCI, Yes Bank and ICICI for working collectively to ensure that millions of our customers and merchants were not inconvenienced a minute longer than necessary. I would also like to take a moment to appreciate the mammoth effort of all the PhonePe employees who worked tirelessly for 36 hours straight with a singular focus on getting all our customer and merchant services live as fast as possible,”
said Sameer Nigam, Founder and CEO PhonePe.
Quote Source: BussinessInsider
BharatPe which provides QR codes to merchants to enable them to accept UPI payments, says that it has put a fleet-on-ground team to replace QR-codes provided by Yes Bank with those issued by ICICI Bank. BharatPe said that 20 percent of its QR codes were issued by Yes Bank.
