Third-party IT audit in final stages, says HDFC Bank CFO

The Reserve Bank of Indiamandated independent third party audit of HDFC Bank's information technology infrastructure is in the final stages, its Chief Financial Officer Srinivasan Vaidyanathan told analysts late on Saturday.

He said that the bank would make disclosures if there was any further update from the bank or regulator.

He was speaking after the bank's declaration of JanMar earnings, where the management fielded many queries on the bank's improvements in technology following curbs on new business imposed by the central bank.

In December, HDFC Bank had said that the RBI had ordered it to temporarily stop all new digital launches and sourcing new credit card customers.

The RBI had put restrictions on the lender following three outages in its digital operations over a two-year period.

On Feb 2, RBI had appointed an external professional information technology firm to carry out a special audit of HDFC Bank’s entire technology infrastructure under the Banking Regulation Act.

On Jan 15, Informist had reported that HDFC Bank is likely to fix the bugs in its mobile and internet banking by March, but the RBI is unlikely to lift the curbs imposed on the bank till a third party fixes.

The management said that it had done the necessary changes, and was awaiting further direction from the central bank, but declined to hazard a guess on the timeline on when the curbs could be lifted.

On the recent outage on Mar 30, Vaidyanathan said that it was due to a server component hardware failure and insisted that these outages were not linked to capacity issues as the bank grew its customer base.

He pointed out the steady accretion in customers every month to illustrate this.

However, he admitted that once curbs were lifted, many of the existing relationships through corporate salary accounts and other personal accounts, could be tapped within a couple of quarters for issuance of credit cards and other offerings. expert evaluates the