PhonePe, other digital partners bear the brunt of YES Bank crisis

PTI, Mar 6, 2020, 4:15 PM IST

Mumbai: After YES Bank was placed under the moratorium, digital payments were impacted as PhonePe, which depends on the cash-strapped lender for its transactions, could not operate.

It can be noted that the bank’s own net banking facilities have not been operational since last evening. Other fintech operators who rely on YES Bank to settle their transactions are also down.

We sincerely regret the long outage. Our partner bank (YES Bank) was placed under moratorium by RBI. The entire team’s been working all night to get services back up asap (as soon as possible), the app’s chief executive Sameer Nigam tweeted early in the morning.

Dear @PhonePe_ customers. 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 asap. We hope to be live in a few hours. Thanks for your patience. Stay tuned for updates!

— Sameer.Nigam (@_sameernigam) March 6, 2020

PhonePe, one of the country’s largest digital payment platforms, is dependent on YES Bank to process its transactions.

We are temporarily unavailable.

We are going through an unscheduled maintenance activity. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

We’ll be back soon.

— PhonePe (@PhonePe_) March 5, 2020

He added that the app hopes to be live in a few hours.

YES Bank placed under a moratorium Thursday evening, with the RBI capping deposit withdrawals at Rs 50,000 per account for a month and superseding its board.

YES Bank will not be able to grant or renew any loan or advance, make any investment, incur any liability or agree to disburse any payment.

For the next month, YES Bank will be led by the RBI-appointed administrator Prashant Kumar, an ex-chief financial officer of SBI. He added that the app – one of the most popular interfaces for UPI transactions – hopes to be live in a few hours.