BANKS

HDFC Bank hopes to fix outage issue in 3 months

Eager to resume launching new credit cards and digital banking initiatives, HDFC Bank submits plan of action to RBI to handle outage issue.

Eager to resume launching new credit cards and digital banking initiatives, HDFC Bank has submitted a plan of action to the Reserve Bank of India to handle repeated service disruption issues caused by outage. The country's largest private sector lender hopes to improve its technology platform in three months.

The action plan will take 10-12 weeks for implementation, a senior HDFC Bank official said at an analysts meet. Based on the satisfaction level, the RBI will lift the ban, he added.

On 2 December, RBI had temporarily barred HDFC from launching its digital business generating activities under ‘Digital 2.0’, along with sourcing new credit card customers. The regulator took this move after HDFC Bank suffered its third big outage within two years.

HDFC Bank, which is the largest issuer of credit cards in the country, has been classified as a systemically important entity by the RBI in the past. As of September 2020, the bank had 1.49 crore credit card customers while it had 3.38 debit card takers.