RBI Orders HDFC Bank To Halt New Digital Products, Sourcing New Credit Card Customers Over Frequent Disruptions On Digital Banking Services

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has acted against HDFC bank for its inability to fix frequent outages and disruption of its digital banking services that has tremendously inconvenienced customers.

RBI, in an order dated December 2, 2020 to HDFC Bank with regards to incidents of outage in its internet banking, mobile banking and payment utility services over the past two years, has directed 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 central bank also took note of the most recent outage on November 21, which reportedly occurred due to a power failure in the bank’s primary data centre

The order also states that HDFC Bank’s board must examine the lapses and fix accountability.

“The above measures shall be considered for lifting upon satisfactory compliance with the major critical observations as identified by the RBI,” it added.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) had on Nov 24 sought an explanation from HDFC Bank for the disruption in its digital services over the previous weekend

“An unexpected outage at one of our data centres has impacted some of our services. We are working towards restoration of the services, which shouldn’t take long. The inconvenience is sincerely regretted,” HDFC Bank explained in Twitter.

However, this is the third incident in the previous two-three years that such an occurrence has taken place with the lender. Previously, the users of the bank have had to face similar issues briefly in December 2018 and 2020 too.