Bengaluru: Payments and banking company, Cashfree, has revealed that the platform migrated more than 10 lakh Yes Bank UPI handles to ICICI Bank within the first 100 hours of the announcement of the moratorium on the bank.
On Thursday, March 5, Yes Bank’s UPI handles stopped accepting payments after the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) imposed a moratorium on the bank that affected both peer to peer payments as well as merchant payments. Among Cashfree’s affected products was the Autocollect product that allowed the automatic generation of multiple UPI handles with QR codes that businesses can share with their users to accept UPI payments.
Commenting on this development, Akash Sinha, Co-founder & CEO 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.”
“I am glad to share that the Cashfree team was able to migrate more than 10 lakh Yes Bank virtual UPI IDs to ICICI Bank within 100 hours of the RBI moratorium announcement that rendered Yes Bank UPI handles temporarily non-functional. This has been made possible by great support from our banking partners – ICICI Bank and Yes Bank. We are also thankful to the NPCI team that facilitated this migration. We are glad that we could help our merchants continue using their original UPI handles without having to switch to other UPI handles,” he further added.
Ashish Sonone, Co-founder of KhataBook, one of the affected merchants, said “The Cashfree team swung into action and worked tirelessly to migrate the existing Yes Bank handles to ICICI Bank. It was critical to ensure that the existing Yes Bank handles remained in use since replacing them entailed replacing the already deployed QR codes. We were able to make the first test transfer on the existing handles within 72 hours of UPI handles being blocked. We are now processing live payments via UPI QR, and things seem almost settled now.”
While individuals could switch to alternate UPI apps and UPI handles, the businesses using Yes Bank handles for collecting payments were affected to a much greater extent. The migration of UPI handles from Yes Bank to ICICI Bank involved interactions between multiple stakeholders including NPCI, ICICI Bank, Yes Bank and Cashfree. This migration was critical to allow businesses to continue accepting payments on their existing UPI handles and not lose valuable time and money to create and deploy new UPI handles.
In February this year, Cashfree launched a comprehensive UPI Stack for businesses with 15+ integrations of UPI across checkout flows to allow both collection and sending money. UPI Stack by Cashfree allows businesses to integrate SDKs and APIs of all UPI apps, such as Google Pay, PhonePe, Paytm and WhatsApp very quickly.
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