DBS Bank is planning to invest US$58 million (S$80 million) to improve technology resiliency after its banking services experienced a series of digital disruptions this year.
It has rolled out a roadmap that encompasses both immediate and longer-term measures to strengthen its technology governance, systems, and processes.
DBS CEO Piyush Gupta said they had set aside a "special budget of S$80 million to enhance system resiliency."
Customers will see "improved service reliability" when the roadmap is completed, he said.
DBS formulated the roadmap with inputs from Accenture, an independent third party appointed to carry out a root cause investigation of a disruption incident in March that affected digital banking and payment services for about 10 hours.
The findings of the Accenture review – completed in August – were also corroborated against recent disruptions: the 26 September incident impacting FAST/PayNow transactions, the 14 October data centre incident, as well as the 20 October incident when some customers had intermittent access to DBS PayLah!.
It has identified gaps and deficiencies in the bank's technology risk governance and oversight, incident management, system resilience, and change management.
Remediation measures
Along with leadership changes, DBS has split its technology and operations (T&O) function into two separate units to allow for dedicated management oversight of each, due to the function's "increased complexity and scale".
DBS said it has commenced work to establish "clearer ownership and management" of incidents within the bank, as well as between the bank and its service providers and vendors.
It will also improve proactive problem management through active review of early warning indicators, identification of other possibly affected areas, and taking preventive actions.
DBS has planned new service availability targets for balance enquiry, and overseas and domestic payments at a service level.
If one of these services becomes temporarily unavailable on a particular digital channel, the bank hopes to ensure the service is available on an alternative digital channel.
Further, DBS aims to limit downtime, where each service is completely unavailable across all digital channels, to no more than an average of 1.5 hours per month over three months.
Should disruptions occur, DBS said the remediation measures being implemented will shorten the recovery time to two hours or less.
DBS expects the implementations to be completed in 12-24 months.
The bank's initiative comes at a time when the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) imposed a six-month pause on all non-essential IT changes in the bank.
MAS said this pause is imposed to ensure DBS will keep a "sharp focus" on restoring the resilience of its digital banking services.
It has also barred DBS from acquiring new business ventures or reducing the size of its branch and ATM networks in Singapore during this period.
Last week the DBS Board and Management apologised for the series of digital disruptions this year and said the bank is addressing the issues at hand with utmost priority.
