Phonepe logs ₹4,000 crore transactions a day after it shifts from Yes Bank to ICICI

• India’s central bank – the Reserve Bank of India capped the withdrawals from YES Bank at ₹50,000 – which resulted in chaos.
• PhonePe, the digital payments company’s servers went down late Thursday night, as it uses YES Bank as the backend for most of its UPI accounts.
• But, with a new UPI partner in ICICI, the startup’s team worked for 36 hours to get the servers back up.

On Thursday (March 5), Phonepe’s team was in for a rude shock – it experienced a service outage, with the RBI moratorium on Yes Bank. The startup was built on YES Bank’s UPI which was down too.

India’s central bank capped the withdrawals from YES Bank at ₹50,000 – which resulted in chaos on Friday morning (March 6).

Overnight, the team began transitioning the UPIs from YES Bank to ICICI, with the help of the National Payments Corporation of India. While ICICI is the new UPI partner for Phonepe, its users can continue to use their UPI with the @ybl handles.

"Friday was an extraordinarily difficult situation with little precedence. We are grateful to 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. I would also like to take a moment to appreciate the mammoth effort of all the PhonePe employees who worked tirelessly for 36 hours straight with a singular focus on getting all our customer and merchant services live as fast as possible,” said Sameer Nigam, Founder and CEO PhonePe.

But there was a reward for the startup at the end of the day – its app bounced back with a mammoth ₹4,000 crore in transactions in a single day with 70 million app sessions.

“The trust and loyalty our customer and merchant partners have reposed in us by coming back in larger numbers than ever before is truly humbling,” said Nigam.

Phonepe even had a banter with Paytm Payments Bank on Twitter. Taking advantage of the moment, Paytm Payments Bank sent out a tweet to Phonepe offering it to build its UPI network through the bank.


However, Phonepe replied, “Inviting you to consider that if your #UPI platform was so 'seamlessly scalable', we'd have called you ourselves.”


The tweet from Paytm was discouraged by many users, as they understood that Phonepe was working hard to restore its services.

See Also:
YES Bank – a leader in UPI transactions leaves payment companies like PhonePe high and dry
A timeline of troubles at YES Bank