PhonePe To Continue Yes Bank Tie-Up For UPI, In Talks To Onboard More Partners
Yes Bank onboarded ICICI Bank as its PSP partner after the Yes Bank moratorium halted UPI transactions on its app for 24 hours.
PhonePe is actively working on adding more payment service providers for UPI-based transactions and will continue to engage with the crisis-hit Yes Bank Ltd., the Flipkart-owned fintech startup said today.
The payments app had on Friday witnessed a service outage for nearly 24 hours after the Reserve Bank of India late on Thursday evening put Yes Bank under a moratorium. Its team worked overnight with the National Payments Corporation of India and new UPI partner, ICICI Bank Ltd., to ensure all its services are up within a day.
"We were actively working on adding other PSP partners, this is also as per the recent NPCI advisory... PhonePe will shortly be launching an additional VPA (virtual payment address) with ICICI Bank," Sameer Nigam, founder and chief executive officer of PhonePe told the Press Trust of India.
Once the Yes Bank moratorium is over, "it will mean PhonePe users will have a choice of two handles from two different banks to work with", he added. Earlier today, the private lender’s RBI-appointed administrator, Prashant Kumar, said the curbs could be lifted as Saturday this week.
While PhonePe declined to comment on the banks it is in talks with, sources said that it is in talks with State Bank of India, HDFC Bank Ltd., Axis Bank Ltd. and RBL Bank Ltd.
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Nigam said services on the PhonePe app were fully resumed on March 6 for all users and merchant partners, with ICICI Bank as the new banking partner.
"All PhonePe consumer @ybl handles are working as before and all 10 million of our merchant QR codes are working seamlessly as well. The platform processed over Rs 4,000 crore worth of transactions in 24 hours and saw its largest-ever volume of user traffic in a single day (with over 70 million app sessions)," he added.