After HDFC Bank’s System Failure, RBI Assigns External IT Firm To Audit Their IT Infrastructure

As per the latest updates, the RBI has appointed a third party to conduct an audit of HDFC Bank’s IT Infrastructure and has sought a report from the company at the earliest.

Why Did This Happen? 

Sources say that the Reserve Bank Of India(RBI) has asked for this inspection to examine if the bank had improved on its digital capabilities following the recent issues.

The move is in the backdrop of incidents of outages in the internet banking/ mobile banking/ payment utilities of the Bank over the past two years.

This also includes the recent outages in the Bank’s internet banking and payment system on November 21, 2020, caused by a power failure in the primary data center.

The same is confirmed by the statement given to exchange mentioning “As an update to the above Intimation, kindly note that RBI has appointed an external professional IT firm for carrying out a special audit of the entire IT infrastructure of the Bank under Section 30 (1-B) of the Banking Regulation Act, 1949 (‘the Act’), at the cost of the Bank under Section 30 (1-C) of the Act,”. 

Special IT Audits

Moving ahead they have asked the Bank’s cooperation to the external professional IT firm, appointed by RBI for conducting the special IT audit.

Further, the bank is expected to implement a short-term plan to fix the digital outage over the next 10-12 weeks.

This plan is mainly aimed at fixing the technical issues which caused the recent multiple outages on HDFC Bank’s digital banking channels. 

HDFC’S Future Plans

Moreover, the lender is hoping to get a reprieve from the regulator on new digital launches after the implementation of the short-term plan.

Prior to this, On December 3, the HDFC Bank informed the RBI asking them to temporarily stop all the launches under its Digital 2.0 initiative.

This also included the sourcing of the new credit card customers.

This was followed by events where the bank has experienced multiple outages in its internet banking, mobile banking and payment utility services over the past two years.

The banks must invest more in building robust IT platforms to fortify public confidence in digital banking, said Shaktikanta Das, the RBI Governor.