Mumbai: The Reserve Bank of India (RBI), on Thursday, directed HDFC Bank to halt its digital launches and issuance of new credit cards, prompting the private sector lender to assure its customers that there was “no reason to worry” and they could continue to transact with the bank as usual.
The RBI had ordered it on December 2 to temporarily stop new digital launches and add credit card customers following technical outages at its primary data center, which hit its payment services last month.
HDFC Bank said that they had faced two outages due to power failures in November 2018 and December 2019 and another incident happened on November 21, 2020.
“We had two outages, one in Nov 2018 and one in Dec 2019. We have taken the help of external expertise, understood what needs to be done further, and have subsequently implemented the inputs to strengthen our IT infrastructure and systems. Unexpectedly another incident happened on Nov 21, 2020, and the primary reason for the same in the power outage in our Primary Data Centre. We are working on war footing to strengthen this are also now,” HDFC Bank said in a statement.
On November 21, the digital payments business was down for more than 12 hours, following a power outage in its primary data center.
The RBI has advised the bank to temporarily stop all launches of its digital business-generating activities planned under Digital 2.0 and other proposed business generating IT applications, and secondly, halt the sourcing of new credit card customers.
(VP)
