MUMBAI :
India’s largest private lender HDFC Bank on Tuesday said that the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has appointed an external firm to conduct a special audit of the entire IT infrastructure of the bank.
HDFC Bank was ordered to halt its digital banking initiatives and freeze credit card issuances until it addresses the lapses that led to a series of glitches. The lender’s e-banking service faced three outages since 2018, inconveniencing customers. Days after the order, RBI governor Shaktikanta Das hinted that it does not take customer inconvenience lightly and urged financial institutions to spend more on information technology (IT) infrastructure.
“…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,” it said.
The bank said it will extend its cooperation to the external professional IT firm appointed by RBI.
HDFC Bank said last month it has provided a remedial plan on its e-banking outages to the regulator and expects the strategies to take shape in 10-12 weeks, following which it will request an inspection by the regulator.
Srinivasan Vaidyanathan, chief financial officer of the bank told analysts on 16 January that it is also making some long-term upgrades in technology that will take 12-18 months.
“See, we have several action plans from strengthening of the disaster recovery or the recovery point and the recovery time and automating the orchestration tool to get onto the disaster recovery side or architectural efficiencies, cloud strategy, et cetera, there are several strategies that we have,” said Vaidyanathan, according to a transcript of the call available on Bloomberg.