The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has appointed an external IT firm to audit the IT infrastructure of Indian private sector lender HDFC Bank following a series of outages.
The central bank had penalised the bank for repeated service outages of its internet banking services.
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Last December, the RBI ordered the bank to stop the issuance of credit cards and the launch of digital banking initiatives, until it addressed the issues that have led to the glitches in its internet banking, mobile banking and payments services.
In November last year, the bank faced a power failure at its main data centre in Mumbai, leading to failed transactions for its customers. Since 2018, HDFC Bank faced three outages, causing inconvenience to its customers.
Last month, the bank submitted a plan of action to the central bank in addressing the repeated outages. The action plan could be implemented between 10 and 12 weeks and the situation could be normalised in three months.
In a regulatory filing with the stock exchanges, HDFC Bank said: “RBI has appointed an external professional IT firm for carrying out a special audit of the entire IT infrastructure of the bank under Section 30 (1-B) of the Banking Regulation Act, 1949…, at the cost of the Bank under Section 30 (1-C) of the Act. The bank shall accordingly extend its cooperation to the external professional IT firm so appointed by RBI for conducting the special IT audit as above.”
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By GlobalDataIt further said: “The bank shall, accordingly, extend its cooperation to the external professional IT firm so appointed by the RBI for conducting the special IT audit.”
The RBI will lift the measures it has taken on the bank after it is fully satisfied that the bank complies with the critical observations that it had made.
In December, RBI governor Shaktikanta Das said: “We cannot put thousands or lakhs of customers, who are using digital banking, into any kind of difficulty for hours together. This is especially when we are ourselves giving so much of emphasis to digital banking.”
