RBI Halts HDFC Bank's Digital Activities! No Sourcing Of New Credit Card Customers Now - Here's Why

RBI has asked the private lender to temporarily stop activities under its Digital 2.0 initiative until the technical glitches are fixed.

(File Photo/ Getty)

HDFC Bank outages: Taking a note of the persistent glitches in HDFC Bank’s digital services, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has asked the private lender bank to stop any fresh activities under its Digital 2.0 initiative which includes the ban in sourcing of new credit card customers. The bank has suffered multiple outages in its internet banking, mobile banking and payment utility services over the past two years. What’s the exact order? As per the order, the RBI has advised the bank to temporarily stop all launches of its digital business generating activities planned under Digital 2.0 and other proposed business generating IT applications, and secondly halt sourcing of new credit card customers. The bank has been asked to examine the lapses and fix accountability. The latest directions comes after the central bank on November 23 sought an explanation from HDFC Bank after its digital services were disrupted from the evening of November 21 till November 22 morning, almost 12 hours. When is it expected to get lifted? “The above measures shall be considered for lifting upon satisfactory compliance with the major critical observations as identified by the RBI,” it added. However, the Bank in its filing to the exchanges has pointed out at several measures taken to fortify its IT systems in the last two years. The bank mentioned about “swiftly closing out the balance and would continue to engage with the Regulator in this regard.” It also sought to reassure customers, stating: “(HDFC Bank) expects  the  current  supervisory  actions  will  have  no  impact  on  its  existing  credit  cards,  digital banking channels and existing operations and believes that these measures will not materially impact its overall business.” What’s the error in HDFC Bank’s digital services? HDFC Bank has witnessed multiple failures in regards to digital services with customers complaining of inability to conduct credit and debit card transactions, internet banking, UPI, IMPS, and other modes of payment. On November 21, customers complained of the payment stack being inoperative to which the bank said it was an unexpected outage at one of its data centres. In a similar incident last year, customers had complained of not able to pay their loan EMIs or settle credit card bills on time. It was later detected that the outage happened as the lender "underestimated" growth in payment volumes and the disruption was mostly a capacity issue. Although it had denied any the rumour of a cyber-attack but mentioned the same being communicated to the banking regulator.