HDFC Bank MD on RBI order over outages, says ‘bank working on war footing to resolve issues'

After the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) temporarily barred HDFC Bank from launching digital initiatives and issuing new credit cards, over serious outages at bank over the last two years, the bank’s MD & CEO Sashidhar Jagdishan apologised to customers, and said, bank is working on "war footing" to resolve the issue.

The RBI order asked HDFC Bank to temporarily stop any new digital banking launches and sourcing of new credit cards, until its board investigates disruptions in its information technology services, fixes responsibility, and improves them.

On the RBI action on outages, HDFC Bank MD & CEO allayed customers’ fears, saying they can continue to transact with the bank, claimed that the problem areas would be identified and rectified, and the bank would emerge stronger again.

Emphasising on recent developments the bank has taken, the MD said they are improving the front-end digital experience, next-general mobile and internet banking and APIs based banking and this new-age banking would be launched post approval from the regulators.

The bank's MD & CEO said the RBI order was a fallout of two major outages, one in November 2018 and the other in December 2019. Though the bank said it took steps to strengthen its information technology systems after these incidents, power outage at a data centre triggered another incident in November this year.