The Reserve Bank of India has appointed an external IT firm for carrying out a special audit of the IT infrastructure of HDFC Bank, which has faced a number of outages in its digital banking services.

“The RBI has appointed an external professional IT firm for carrying out a special audit of the entire IT infrastructure of the bank under Section 30 (1‐B) of the Banking Regulation Act, 1949 (“the Act”), at the cost of the bank under Section 30 (1‐C) of the Act,” HDFC Bank said in a regulatory filing on Tuesday.

Also read: HDFC Bank’s internet, mobile services hit for third day in a row

The bank shall accordingly extend its cooperation to the external professional IT firm for conducting the special IT audit, it further said.

Also read: HDFC Bank’s multiple digital outages are credit negative: Moody’s

RBI had on December 2 last year directed HDFC Bank to temporarily halt sourcing of new credit card customers as well as launches of digital business generating activities planned under its proposed programme ‐Digital 2.0.

The directive had come after a sudden outage at one of HDFC Bank’s data centres impacted its digital and mobile banking and ATM and payment services on November 21, 2020 and a similar outage in December 2019.

In an analyst call after its third quarter results, HDFC Bank had said it had submitted a blueprint to the RBI on how to address these digital outages. The bank had said the action plan will take 10-12 weeks for implementation, and further timeframe will depend on the RBI's inspection.

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