DBS Bank has been directed to expand an in-train review of its digital banking services, which was sparked by a large-scale March outage, to cover a fresh outage that occurred last Friday.
The bank must also hold “additional regulatory capital” as part of its operating conditions, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) declared.
Digital banking services and ATMs were impacted by an almost hour-long disruption about lunchtime on Friday May 5.
It was the second incident in the space of two months, after a much larger outage impacted DBS’ digital services at the end of March.
The earlier incident had also led to greater capital requirements being imposed on the bank - now increased further - as well as several reviews.
“After the March incident, DBS Bank had convened a special board committee to oversee a full review of the bank’s IT resiliency, to be performed by an independent external expert,” MAS said in a statement.
“MAS had then directed DBS Bank to conduct a comprehensive review, including an assessment of the adequacy of management oversight, staff competencies, operational processes, system resiliency, and architecture design for its digital banking services.
“Although the causes of the March and May incidents appear distinct from each other, MAS has now required the review to cover the May incident as well.”
While this work is still underway, MAS said it had directed DBS Bank “to take immediate steps to improve the resiliency and recoverability of its existing system, including enhanced monitoring, more comprehensive testing and additional system redundancies, in order to minimise disruption of its services to its customers.”
The authority’s deputy managing director of financial supervision) Ho Hern Shin said DBS Bank had “fallen short of MAS’ expectations for banks to deliver reliable services to their customers.”
“The repeated inconvenience caused to the public is unacceptable,” Ho said.
“DBS Bank must spare no effort in dealing with the underlying issues leading to these disruptions.”
DBS CEO Piyush Gupta apologised for the pair of “digital disruptions” that had hit the bank’s services.
“Our customers rightly expect more of us, and we are committed to doing better,” Gupta said.
Gupta added that its technology resiliency review would be completed “as a matter of utmost priority” and that the bank would “implement all recommendations expeditiously.”
