Private sector lender HDFC Bank is likely to submit a shortlist of candidates to the Reserve Bank of India by July or August this year to replace its outgoing Managing Director and CEO Aditya Puri and is also working to increase capacity to address the glitches on its mobile and internet banking platform.

In a conference call with analysts after the bank’s third quarter results, Sashidhar Jagdishan, Additional Director and Executive Director, HDFC Bank, said the Board in its meeting on Saturday had agreed on the search firm to help in the search process.

“We do have kind of a road map or a glide path as to when the long list of candidates, the short list of candidates, whether both globally, more external and internal, will happen; when the interviews will be slated... The granular details have all been agreed upon in the board meeting today,” he said in reply to a question, adding that the bank is likely to submit the list of shortlisted names to the RBI to select by July and August.

Puri, who has been associated with HDFC Bank since 1994, will retire in October 2020 on attaining the age of 70 years. The bank had in November last year set up a committee to identify the successor to Puri.

Technical glitches

Meanwhile, when asked about the outages on its mobile and netbanking platform, Jagdishan stressed that it was not a cyber attack but more of a capacity issue. The bank had also communicated the same to the RBI when the incident happened last month.

“We realised that as a company, we have been victims of our own success. What we did not realise is the kind of increase in businesses across liability, across assets, across payment products; and within payment products, multiple channels that we have been patronising, whether it is the cards, whether it’s the UPI volumes. I think we underestimated the growth in these volumes,” he said, adding that the volumes have gone even beyond five times capacity the bank had originally envisaged.

Noting that this was the second incident and was more of a capacity issue, he said that the bank hopes to be in a more comfortable position in the next three to five months with a lot more capacity being added. The bank is already adding capacity and has been rationalising volumes.

In the beginning of December last year, HDFC Bank’s internet and mobile banking services faced an outage for nearly three days before being normalised. A team of experts from the RBI had also examined the issue as most of the bank’s account holders were unable to transact business.

“We are cognisant of that problem. It happened on the December 2, and it was because of the technical glitches, which was restored on Tuesday. And yesterday, there were some media reports that again customers are not able to access the digital banking from that particular bank. Again, we checked it up and it has been restored quickly. Our team has gone to really identify the reasons and find out what we can give them as a direction,” RBI Deputy Governor MK Jain had said in response to a question on the issue at the monetary policy press conference on December 5.

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