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 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,” said HDFC Bank in a regulatory filing on Tuesday.

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

The RBI had, on December 2 last year, directed HDFC Bank to temporarily halt the 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 time frame will depend on the RBI’s inspection.

Market sources said the move is in the right direction and is going as per the process.

Credit card business is a key focus area of HDFC Bank, which had 1.53 crore outstanding credit cards at the end of November 2020. According to its Annual Report 2019-20, it has over 5.6 crore customers and digital transactions accounted for 95.1 per cent of all retail transactions.

On Tuesday, HDFC Bank scrip touched a high of ₹1,578 apiece on the BSE before closing the day 5.63 per cent higher at ₹1,560.4 apiece.

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