Yes Bank crisis leaves travellers, students using forex cards in the lurch

Yes Bank being put under moratorium has put foreign travellers and students who used its prepaid forex cards in the lurch, with no transactions going through for the past three days.

Among those who have been affected is Snehal Pradhan, former member of the Indian women cricket team, who is in Australia currently.

She, like many other impacted people from across the globe, took to the microblogging site Twitter in search of a solution and also tagged Yes Bank's partner Bookmyforex.com.

Following the bank being put under moratorium and the restrictions thereof, the lender was unable to play its role to let UPI payments happen for popular apps like PhonePe which depended exclusively on the bank. The app was forced to switch to rival ICICI Bank within a day to restart transactions.

"In Australia for almost another week and my forex card has been deactivated. Why? Cos it's a Yes Bank card. Most of my currency is on that card and I'm stranded," Pradhan tweeted on Friday.

In reply, Bookmyforex mentioned that Yes Bank may be the cause for the trouble.

"We want to let you know that these transactions are getting declined at the Visa level itself. We're doing everything we can and we're in touch with Visa, Yes Bank and RBI to get cards operational again. Please do bear with us for some time," it said.

Similarly, students who are out of the country for a longer duration and depend upon prepaid cards for meeting their requirements, also seemed to be affected, with many of them tweeting for help.

Meanwhile, the bank on Sunday said it has restarted the ATM withdrawal service for its account holders at own or other banks' outlets, which was shut since Thursday.

In a statement issued on Sunday, PhonePe said it has processed over Rs 4,000 crore worth of transactions in 24 hours and saw its largest-ever volume of user traffic in a single day.