Yes Bank Crisis Hit Payments Apps

Walmart’s payment services provider PhonePe have suffered an outage after the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Thursday put Yes Bank under moratorium. Strangely, PhonePe, despite its big transactions is fully dependent on Yes Bank, as its payment gateway or payment services provider (PSP) and thus could not carry out any single transaction since Thursday evening. In addition, many users of Yes Bank’s application programming interface (API) banking services are also facing severe issues in transactions. The moratorium on Yes Bank has also affected several small, cooperative banks that dependent on the crisis-hit lender for electronic inter-bank payment transactions.

Yes Bank Crisis Hit Walmart's PhonePe Payments App
Yes Bank Crisis Hit Payments App

Immediately after the RBI announcement, PhonePe said its services were temporarily not available as it was going through an unscheduled maintenance activity.

However, when the issue remain unresolved, Sameer Nigam, chief executive (CEO) of PhonePe said the issue was due to moratorium placed on Yes Bank by RBI.

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According to an industry expert, the PhonePe case is self-inflicted disaster. “How can an UPI app have only one payment gateway? That too when NPCI encourages all UPI service providers to have as many PSPs as they can? In this case, PhonePe may have gone for PSP with lowest bidding or cheapest transaction rates with Yes Bank. But this is an important lesson for all other players in the market,” the expert, who done not want to be named, says.

Yes Bank is payment service provider (PSP) of PhonePe. In addition, several unified payments interface (UPI) users with @ybl signature will not be able to carry out any financial transactions. This includes PhonePe, Swiggy, Flipkart, MakeMyTrip, Cleartrip, Airtel, RedBus, Microsoft Kaizala and Udaan among others.

Yes Bank Crisis Hit Payments Apps
Yes Bank Crisis Hit Payments Apps

Here is the list of third party UPI apps and their PSP bank…

list of third party UPI apps and their PSP bank
List of third party UPI apps and their PSP bank. Source: NPCI

Yes Bank was the first in India to digitise business to business (B2B) supply chain with its API banking services. It allowed cash payment or receivable facility from any enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to businesses and also provided daily account settlement for easy reconciliation.

Out of the 1,303 banks that are live on national automated clearing house (NACH), 134 cooperative, district and urban cooperative banks are dependent on Yes Bank for their electronic inter-bank transactions. Yes Bank has 593 IFSC codes, data from the NPCI shows.

Yogesh Sapkale for Moneylife

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