Over 1 million users migrate to ICICI Bank’s UPI handles
1 min read . Updated: 13 Mar 2020, 12:31 AM IST
Premium- Reports say Yes Bank accounted for 39% of all UPI payments made in the country, the highest among any bank
- NPCI had blocked the UPI handles of Yes Bank after it was placed under moratorium
NEW DELHI : Payments platform Cashfree Payments India Pvt. Ltd said it has migrated over one million users from Yes Bank Ltd’s UPI (Unified Payments Interface) handles to those of ICICI Bank Ltd. The company said its product, Autocollect, which allows automatic generation of multiple UPI handles with QR codes, had been affected by Yes Bank’s recent collapse.
The Reserve Bank of India imposed a moratorium on Yes Bank on 5 March. The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) in turn blocked the lender’s UPI handles, according to people in the industry, which led to many failed UPI payments.
Recent reports suggest that Yes Bank accounted for 39% of all UPI payments made in the country, the highest among any bank.
Akash Sinha, co-founder and chief executive officer of Cashfree, said, “At the time of the outage, more than 10 lakh UPI handles were actively transacting. These UPI handles were being used for the collection of offline kirana payments, utility bills payment, loan repayment, B2B retailer distribution payments, among others."
Payments app PhonePe had also taken a hit because of the bank’s collapse. Yes Bank was PhonePe’s sole partner bank for UPI payments, which led to failure in its UPI platform following the moratorium. PhonePe came back up later that day.
Since PhonePe didn’t migrate its users to other banks when it came back up, it would seem that NPCI had allowed payments on Yes Bank’s UPI handles; however, consumers would eventually have to migrate to other banks and the same would have to be done by the payments platforms and apps.
With NPCI invalidating the bank’s UPI handles, it meant anyone who held virtual payment addresses ending with @ybl or @yesbank now had an invalid virtual payment address. Companies will also have to change QR codes on offline locations that were made using Yes Bank’s virtual payment addresses.
