Private sector lender HDFC Bank, which has had multiple outages in its mobile and net banking services, said it is awaiting guidance from the Reserve Bank of India on the temporary halt on sourcing of new credit card customers and digital launches.

“All the elements around the technology audit have been completed. We are awaiting further direction from the regulator. We don’t have any timelines as of now but we hope we will see some feedback from the regulator quite soon,” said Ramesh Lakshminarayanan, Chief Information Officer, HDFC Bank.

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The bank’s mobile banking app saw intermittent outage on June 15 but the issue was resolved by afternoon. Previously, there were also problems in March this year and December last year in the mobile and net banking facilities of the lender.

Hardware failure

Speaking to reporters, Lakshminarayanan said the outages were not related to capacity issues but were largely due to hardware or process failure.

The private sector lender has also been working on its IT infrastructure and to ensure that technology challenges are settled in a faster time span.

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Lakshminarayanan said the lender had started working on these issues about 18 months ago, even before the directive from the RBI, which has made it more focussed on addressing these problems.

Digital products in the offing

HDFC Bank also plans to roll out multiple digital products in the next 15 to 24 months, once the RBI lifts the halt. It is looking to address customer facing areas and will focus on payments and cards with some of these changes towards the year-end.

Significantly, the bank is also working on two key initiatives – digital factory and an enterprise factory, Lakshminarayanan said.

While the digital factory would be focussed on rolling out digital products, the enterprise factory would focus on renewing the bank’s IT infrastructure. The bank has also hired new talent as part of the digital factory initiative.

He also stressed that the investments in IT will lead to better customer experience, which is a key focus area of the bank.

“Customer feedback is paramount. It has not been great, the outages have been a problem but the focus is to move forward based on the suggestions,” he said.

The bank has also changed its strategy and is communicating with customers and taking their feedback.

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