HDFC Bank says no clarity yet on lifting of RBI embargo, in touch with central bank

In terms of operations, HDFC Bank plans to decrease absolute emissions and energy consumed in from the current level of 315,583 million tonne CO2 emissions, increase rooftop solar capacity in large offices and convert 50 percent of its total sourced electricity to renewable energy.

HDFC Bank on 17 June said there is no clarity yet on when the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) will lift the embargo on new digital launches but said the bank is in touch with the regulator on this issue. Asked by when the bank hopes to come out of the ban, Chief Information Officer Ramesh Lakshminarayanan refused to share a timeframe.

In December 2020, the RBI had barred HDFC Bank from launching any new digital products or services and issuing new credit cards as a penalty for repeated instances of outages in its online platforms.

Starting December 2020, the bank has brought in better monitoring systems and a more resilient system of shifting to disaster recovery mode, Lakshminarayanan said. After the embargo on digital launches came in December, HDFC Bank has taken a set of actions, including bringing an external auditor for its systems. The audit went on between February and April. “The reports have been submitted to the regulator. We are awaiting further directions from the regulator in this matter,” Lakshminarayanan said.

Lakshminarayanan sought to distinguish between the outages that had occurred before the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) embargo on new digital launches and those that took place after. “We have had outages in December, in March and one yesterday,” Lakshminarayanan said, adding, “We process record numbers of transaction volumes. Having said that, none of these issues has been on account of capacity. We’ve had issues like a hardware failure somewhere, sometimes some components may not have worked effectively.”

Earlier, in January 2020, the management of the bank had attributed older instances of outages to capacity issues. “We realised as a company, we have been victims of our own success. What one would have envisaged is that from a base level you normally size up for four-five times the capacity. We realise the volumes have gone even beyond the five times capacity that we had originally sized up. So, it is more of a capacity issue,” Sashidhar Jagdishan, then executive director, HDFC Bank, had told analysts in a conference call.