State Bank of India’s (SBI) flagship mobile banking application, YONO, has been facing issues for the past few days, with customers raising their concerns on social media. In a tweet on Thursday, the bank said that the mobile banking app has been impacted by a system outage and that necessary steps were being taken to restore services.

One of the banks’ customers tweeted that they could not access the app for the past two days, nor could they log on to their internet banking account. Another customer said, via Twitter, that they could not make payments through the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) because of the slowdown on the network. Others also said that UPI services on third-party apps were also down since the bank was facing server issuers. Several complaints also pointed out that the app had thrown up an error code “M005: Cannot process now. Please try again later” on the screen when they had tried to log in.

“Steps are being take for restoration of uninterrupted service. We regret the inconvenience caused and request customers to use OnlineSBI and YONO Lite for their banking needs,” the bank said.

We have reached out to SBI for comment. We will update this post with their responses, once received.

This is not the first issue the country’s largest bank has faced with its app. Just last month, several customers had raised similar complaints. In response, on November 24, it tweeted, “We regret the inconvenience caused. There are intermittent connectivity issues with our Servers. Kindly bear with us as our team is on the job to resolve the issue at the earliest. In the meantime, we suggest you to use our other digital channels.” Prior to this, SBI’s internet banking and mobile banking platforms were offline on November 8 and 22, as the bank was upgrading its internet banking platform, it said in multiple tweets.

SBI launched YONO as a full-suite financial services platform for its customers on the mobile back in November 2017. According to the banks’ investor presentation, as of September 2020, YONO had 28.5 million registered users. The bank has a total of 80.7 million internet banking users and around 120 million UPI users. And around 65% of transactions flowing through SBI’s systems take place digitally, it said. SBI has mobilised a loan portfolio of ₹25,000 crore and a deposit portfolio of ₹60,000 crore through YONO since its inception, the banks’ management said during an earnings call on November 4.

Earlier this year, the bank said that it plans to hive-off YONO into a separate Banking as a Service (BaaS) entity, so that smaller banks like cooperative banks, rural banks and others can use the apps’ underlying technology in return for a fee. SBI has also recently launched a corporate solution, YONO Business, for its institutional clients to access corporate banking services, supply chain finance, forex services, cash management and trade services through a one-stop platform.

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