Invested in tech infra: HDFC Bank
Troubled by outages in the past, bank says can handle potential extra load for the next 5 years
After facing five instances of downtimes in 28 months, the country’s largest private sector lender, HDFC Bank, is working on a four-pronged plan to make its technology infrastructure robust and scalable.
In a letter to employees, Sashi Jagdishan, MD & CEO of the bank, said: “...we have embarked on a scalechanging technology adoption and transformation agenda to help drive our ambitious growth plans”.
He further said in the current financial year, there would be some pandemic-related challenges, but broad macro-opportunities would be available across retail, MSME, and corporate banking spaces for the bank across geographies like the semi-urban and rural markets. Jagdishan assured employees that this year, too, the bank will follow its normal practice as far as the compensation cycle is concerned.
The bank has decided to embark on a “technology transformation agenda” to provide its customers smoother, faster, and better banking experience.
In the letter, Jagdishan listed out the initiatives the bank would be taking under the “technology transformation agenda”, such as infrastructure scalability, where the bank has heavily invested to handle any potential extra load for the next five years.
Second, the bank has strengthened its process of monitoring its data centre (DC) and has shifted key applications to the new DC. Also, the bank has enhanced its monitoring capabilities to manage DC operations and resiliency processes. The bank has also strengthened its firewalls.
“We have to be scanning the horizon for potential security issues and be prepared to face them. We haven’t had any security issues in the past. But this is always an important area of focus and action plans are underway for further robustness”, Jagdishan said.
Among other things, the bank has put in place an enhanced application monitoring mechanism across the board to help keep its IT system “always on”.
In the past few years, HDFC Bank customers have faced several outages when it comes to digital banking services. The first incident happened in November 2018, when the new mobile banking app crashed due to unprecedented demand to download the application. Since then, Jagdishan said, “we have upgraded our mobile app seven times over the last two years and in all these instances, it has been a smooth affair with no downtime or customer inconvenience whatsoever”.
In December 2019, HDFC Bank customers faced an outage with the mobile bank app because one of the vendor’s systems upgrade patch issue was faulty. It has been addressed by the bank adequately.
Last year November, the bank faced an outage at its data centre; it was led by a third-party human error. In March this year, customers faced an outage in mobile and net banking services because of a faulty signature on the bank’s HIPS (host intrusion prevention software). Following this incident, again on March 31, 2021, banks’ customers faced another downtime in mobile and net banking services on account of a hardware component failure in one of the banks’ database servers, resulting in a slow response to some of our customers.
Irked by the repeated outages, the Reserve Bank of India, in December last year, had directed the bank to temporarily halt all its digital launches, as well as new sourcing of credit card customers.
“WE HAVE EMBARKED ON A SCALE-CHANGING TECHNOLOGY ADOPTION AND TRANSFORMATION AGENDA TO HELP DRIVE OUR AMBITIOUS FUTURE GROWTH PLANS” SASHI JAGDISHAN MD & CEO, HDFC Bank