After the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) temporarily barred HDFC Bank from launching digital banking initiatives and issuing new credit cards, Sashidhar Jagdishan, MD and CEO of HDFC Bank apologised to customers and assured them that there is no reason to worry. “You can continue to transact with the bank without any concern,” he said in a message to all customers. RBI’s move came days after the last instance of service outage across HDFC’s digital banking channels, including internet banking, mobile banking and other payments. The outage, which happened on November 21, had severely inconvenienced customers, the bank informed the exchanges on Thursday.
“We had two outages, one in Nov 2018 and second one in Dec 2019. We have taken help of external expertise, understood what needs to be done further and have substantially implemented the inputs to strengthen our IT infrastructure and systems. Unexpectedly another incident happened on Nov 21, 2020 and the primary reason for the same is the power outage in our Primary Data Centre. We are working on war footing to strengthen this area also now,” Sashidhar wrote.
He added the bank is working on some digital initiatives to improve the front end digital experience, improve digital origination, straight through processing, next generation of mobile and internet banking, APIs based banking on the edge etc would be readied and launched post the approval and clearance from the regulator.
“We will work with experts and the regulator to fortify the identified areas for improvement. Internally, we are looking at this as an opportunity to further improve ourselves and emerge stronger,” he added.
RBI has also asked HDFC Bank to ensure that its board "examines the lapses and fixes accountability". This is the first major challenge faced by its new chief executive Shashidhar Jagdishan, who took charge in late October.
“It is our commitment to you that we will leave no stone unturned in our quest to ensure a smooth experience for you all across our digital channels. We shall keep striving to further reinforce the trust you have reposed on us,” Sashidhar added.
The bank is the largest issuer of credit cards and had 1.49 crore customers as of September this year while on the debit cards front, it had 3.38 crore customers
With PTI inputs