The YES Bank fiasco hit the UPI transactions last week and PhonePe which is the UPI partner of the private lender was the most affected.
PhonePe, with close to 20 crore users, saw an extended service outage, which started immediately after the RBI moratorium on Yes Bank.
Well, guess who stepped in as the new UPI partner to YES Bank? Private lender ICICI Bank partnered with YES Bank and soon after, it expercienced a boost in the digital payment business of the bank.
The company worked with the NPCI and ICICI bank, its new UPI partner.
Sources from ICICI Bank said that all merchant payment settlements were restored by Friday noon and all consumer wallet, credit and debit card payments were restored by 3 pm, the company said in a statement.
Moreover, the UPI services were restored by Friday night, with PhonePe users continuing to use their UPI @ybl handles.
Sameer Nigam, founder and CEO of PhonePe said that the employees had to work for 36 hours straight in order to achieve this. "We are grateful to the 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," he said.
The platform processed transactions of over Rs 4,000 crore in 24 hours and saw its largest ever volume of user traffic in a single day (with over 70 million app sessions).
The ICICI Bank officials worked with the PhonePe team closely and created nodal accounts, reconciliation systems, and processing systems in the back end.
Officials from the legal, accounts, technology and banking to ensure that the everything was in place for the convenience of the customers.
Sources told Moneycontrol that the services like instant current account opening helped the bank to migrate the UPI users immediately. The sources also said that though a no-objection certificate is required while moving accounts between two banks, they let go all these formalities and used KYC to open accounts to swiftly start the operations.
Well, sources also said that PhonePe has been in talks with ICICI after NPCI made it mandatory to have a multiparty model for all UPI third party applications.
As of now most of the accounts have been moved to ICICI Bank and others are likely to be done over the next few days said the source.
Earlier, several petrol pumps rejected most of the UPI-based transactions over the weekend, including Paytm, PhonePe, and GooglePay.
Even BharatPe, which deploys QR codes at small merchant outlets, stopped functioning.
Millions of users failed to make or receive payments because of curbs imposed on Yes Bank.
