The Reserve Bank of India has asked HDFC Bank Ltd. to put a temporary halt to all digital banking launches and sourcing of new credit card customers. This comes after the lender faced a series of technical glitches over the last two years.
In a statement to exchanges, India’s largest private lender said the RBI has issued an order dated Dec. 2, 2020, with regard to “certain incidents of outages in internet banking/ mobile banking/ payment utilities of the bank over the past two years, including the recent outages in the bank’s internet banking and payment system on Nov. 21, 2020, due to a power failure in the primary data centre.”
In the order, the RBI has asked the bank to temporarily stop:
- All launches of digital business generating activities planned under its program Digital 2.0
- Other proposed business generating IT applications
- Sourcing of new credit card customers
The RBI has also asked the bank’s board to examine the lapses and fix accountability.
HDFC Bank said that the lifting of the regulatory measures would be considered after satisfactory compliance with critical observations made by the RBI. The bank said it will ensure that the current supervisory actions don’t impact existing card customers, digital banking channels and other operations.
“The bank believes that these measures will not materially impact its overall business,” HDFC Bank said in the exchange notification.
Last month, the private bank said its services had faced technical issues because of a power outage at one of its data centres in Mumbai. Previously, too, HDFC Bank has faced similar issues with outages across its net banking services.
