RBI APPOINTS EXTERNAL FIRM TO AUDIT HDFC BANK’S IT INFRA

MUMBAI: India’s largest private lender HDFC Bank Tuesday said the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has appointed an external firm to conduct a special audit of its entire IT infrastructure.

In December, RBI ordered HDFC Bank to halt its digital banking initiatives and freeze credit card issuances until it addressed the lapses that led to a series of glitches. The lender’s e-banking service faced three outages since 2018, inconveniencing customers.

“…kindly note that 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,” it said.

The bank said it will extend cooperation to the IT firm. HDFC Bank said last month it has provided a remedial plan on its e-banking outages to the regulator and expects its strategies to take shape in 10-12 weeks, following which it will request an inspection by the regulator.

Srinivasan Vaidyanathan, CFO of the bank had told analysts on 16 January that it is also making some upgrades in tech that will take 12-18 months. “See, we have several action plans from strengthening of the disaster recovery or the recovery point and the recovery time and automating the orchestration tool to get onto the disaster recovery side or architectural efficiencies, cloud strategy, et cetera, there are several strategies that we have,” he said.