The country’s largest private bank has faced regulatory pressure due to at least five digital outages reported in less than three years. The RBI has asked the bank’s board to identify lapses and fix accountability. The current outage comes at a time when the bank is expected to get back to the regulator on how it has addressed recurrent issues on its digital banking platforms.
On how long it would take to fix the issues flagged by the RBI, HDFC Bank CFO Srinivasan Vaidyanathan had said in an earnings call on April 17 that it has demarcated the actions between short-, medium- and long-term and that it was focusing on disaster recovery (DR) and network monitoring in the short term.
“Long-term (issues) could take 12-18 months (to address) — cloud strategy is an example. In the short term, it is about DR resiliency, where we tune recovery time and recovery point…In the medium term (6 months), some more security enhancements, automation of the whole process in terms of orchestration (will happen). And both in the short and medium term, we will have application network monitoring tools coming through,” Vaidyanathan had said, adding that the bank has set higher standards in some of the processes it is implementing.
In December, the RBI had barred HDFC Bank from any digital launches and issuance of fresh credit cards until it resolved its IT issues. The RBI action had followed prolonged issues in November due to a power outage at the bank’s data centre. Mumbai-based AAA technologies has been appointed by the RBI to conduct an IT audit of HDFC Bank.
Incidentally, several HDFC bank customers have been facing intermittent issues since the lender updated its iOS app last week. Customers have complained about getting a blank screen after opening the updated app.
HDFC Bank’s stock ended with a 0.7% gain at Rs 1,490 by close of Tuesday’s trade on the BSE after it announced that its board will consider a dividend in a meeting on June 18.
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