HDFC admits glitches in digital banking services, says resolving issues

The country's largest private sector lender HDFC Bank on Tuesday said it is taking steps to resolve glitches in its digital banking platform and restore services on priority.

"Some customers are facing intermittent issues accessing our NetBanking/MobileBanking App. We are looking into it on priority for resolution. We apologize for the inconvenience and request you to try again after sometime. Thank you," HDFC Bank said in a tweet.

This is not for the first time that the customers of the bank have faced service outage. In fact, the bank has been penalised by the Reserve bank of India (RBI) for two major outages in the past.

In December, the RBI temporarily barred HDFC Bank from launching new digital banking initiatives and issuing new credit cards after taking a serious view of service outages at the lender over the last two years.

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"RBI has issued an order dated December 2, 2020, to HDFC Bank Ltd with regard to certain incidents of outages in the 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 November 21, 2020, due to a power failure in the primary data centre,” HDFC Bank had said in a regulatory filing.

The bank has been penalised for two major outages, one in November 2018 and the other in December 2019.

Taking a stern view of the repeated outages, RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das had said in December the regulator had some concerns about certain deficiencies and it was necessary that HDFC Bank strengthens its IT system before expanding further.

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“... we cannot have thousands and lakhs of customers who are using digital banking to be in any kind of difficulty for hours together and especially when we are ourselves giving so much emphasis on digital banking. Public confidence in digital banking has to be maintained,” Das had said.

HDFC Bank, the largest lender by assets in the private sector, has been classified as a systemically important entity by the RBI in the past. It is also the largest issuer of credit cards and has a significant share in the payment processing segment.

The bank is the largest issuer of credit cards and had 1.49 crore customers as of September 2020 while on the debit cards front, it had 3.38 crore customers.