The need to maintain people’s confidence in digital banking resulted in the action against HDFC Bank for service outages, RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das said on Friday and exhorted lenders to invest more on the technology front.
The regulator is also studying the incident at SBI, which also faced an outage on Thursday, Das said.
In an unprecedented action, RBI has asked HDFC Bank to stop issuing new credit cards and launching new digital business initiatives because of the repeated instances of service outages over the last two years.
“In the case of HDFC Bank, there were earlier episodes also. HDFC Bank has an overwhelming presence in the digital payment segment, in the internet banking segment. We have some concerns about certain deficiencies etc... It is necessary that the HDFC Bank strengthens its IT systems before expanding further,” Das told reporters. “… 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 on digital banking has to be maintained,” the RBI chief said.
