HDFC Bank gears up for tech transformation after online glitches

Having faced multiple episodes of digital banking glitches in the last 2 years, HDFC Bank has finally embarked on a ‘Technology Transformation Agenda’ to provide secure and safe banking services to its customers.

Sashi Jagdishan, MD, HDFC Bank, in a letter to employees said that the bank has faced 5 instances of downtime in the last 28 months and every instance has hardened the bank’s resolve to do better, keeping customers in mind.

It is to be noted that the RBI temporarily barred HDFC Bank in December 2020, from launching new digital banking initiatives and issuing new credit cards after taking a serious note of service outages at the lender over the last 2 years. The bank was penalised by RBI for 2 major outages, one in November, 2018, and the other in December, 2019.

Taking a stern view of the repeated outages, Shaktikanta Das, Governor, Shaktikanta Das, had said in December that the regulator had some concerns about certain deficiencies and it was necessary that the bank strengthens its IT system before expanding further.

Following this, the bank embarked on a scale-changing technology adoption and transformation agenda to help drive future growth plans.

Providing details of the Technology Transformation Agenda, Jagdishan said that the bank has invested heavily in the infrastructure to handle any potential load that it might encounter in the next 3 to 5 years.

“We are also in the process of accelerating our cloud strategy to be on the cutting edge leveraging best in class cloud service providers,” he further added.