The temporary suspension on Yes Bank has unleashed fresh trouble for India's digital transactions.
On Friday, customers woke up to difficulties with apps like Phone Pe, owned by e-commerce giant Walmart, facing difficulties in executing transactions.
“We sincerely regret the long outage. Our partner bank Yes Bank was placed under moratorium by RBI. Entire team’s been working all night to get services back up as soon as possible,” tweeted Sameer Nigam, founder & CEO, PhonePe. It has over 175 million users.
Trouble spilled over not just to customers of Yes Bank, but other app users as Yes Bank is the leader in digital transactions having processed over 514 million transactions out of the total 1.31 billion transactions registered in January.
Yes Bank handles UPI transactions for third-party apps such as PhonePe, and BharatPe, while the private lender is the sole payments service provider for key businesses such as Cleartrip, Swiggy, Redbus, PVR, and Udaan.
Airtel has reached out to The New Indian Express to clarify that Yes Bank's moratorium will not have any impact on any of its services.
It has commanded a dominant position in digital payments for some time now over others such as Axis and SBI and accounts for nearly 39 per cent of the total transactions registered on UPI in January.
According to sources, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which operates and oversees the country's digital transactions network, took Yes Bank off its grid. It means, the bank's over 8 lakh credit card holders and about 28 lakh debit cardholders cannot use their cards to transact at any of the point of sale terminals. Even NEFT/IMPS services will be difficult to proceed with as of now.
Other third-party applications such as Google Pay are also active in handling UPI transactions.
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