SINGAPORE – DBS Bank will conduct a full review of its processes after its worst digital disruptions in a decade left the bank’s customers fuming last week.<\/p>\n
Chief executive Piyush Gupta apologised for the service outage, telling the Reuters Next conference on Friday (Dec 3): “The customers have the right to expect more from us and I share their frustration and their pain.”<\/p>\n
Account holders could not access their balances or make payments when digital banking services were down for at least two days last week.<\/p>\n
Mr Gupta noted that as banks get more digital and technologically advanced, customer expectations also rise.<\/p>\n
He said the bank will review its processes and come up with ways to do better.<\/p>\n
DBS began encountering issues with its access control servers on Nov 23 that prevented customers logging into bank services. The problem resurfaced the following morning.<\/p>\n
DBS said on Nov 25 that logins and transaction activities had returned to normal that morning, although some customers were still facing issues.<\/p>\n
The bank said the disruption was not caused by a cyber attack and added that customer data was safe.<\/p>\n
The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) said last week that it would consider taking “supervisory action” over the outage.<\/p>\n
Financial institutions must ensure that the total unscheduled downtime for critical systems affecting customer services does not exceed four hours within any 12-month period.<\/p>\n
Last week’s disruptions were not the first DBS has experienced.<\/p>\n
In 2010, MAS took supervisory action when a similar outage took down all consumer and business banking services for more than six hours.<\/p>\n
Join ST’s Telegram channel here and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.<\/p>\n