PhonePE again protests ICICI Bank’s service blockage

Flipkart-owned UPI service PhonePe has demanded an explanation from ICICI Bank for blocking its services. PhonePE chief executive Sameer Nigam has written an open letter to his customers in this regard after ICICI Bank blocked the use of its services for making payments citing "restrictive practices and concerns over data".

Nigam maintained that there was no formal communication or complaint filed by the bank, and said that ICICI Bank's move to deny permission to its customers to link their wallet with their bank accounts had led to failed transactions of more than 20,000 UPI worth Rs5 crore.

''We followed all the detailed guidelines and procedures laid down by NPCI for an app to go live on UPI. We went through over a 100 plus use case test cases, detailed certification, vulnerability assessment, penetration testing and third-party application security testing, before NPCI gave us permission to go live,'' Nigam said in his letter to customers.

"Our UPI payments integration has been live on Flipkart, Myntra and a couple of smaller merchants' websites since Oct 2016. So ICICI had more than two months to inform Yes Bank, NPCI or us if they felt our solutions did not meet the UPI guidelines. Either they felt our integration was okay until now, or they felt we were being restrictive but decided to sit on this fact till now for reasons known only to them," he said while requesting the bank to share its detailed reservations so that PhonePe can review them. (See: Flipkart protests as ICICI Bank blocks PhonePe payments).