DBS’ digital services disruption on Wednesday ‘unacceptable’: MAS
THE Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) said DBS’ day-long disruption to its digital services on Wednesday (Mar 29), coming just after a year following a similar incident in November 2021, is unacceptable. The authority added that it will take “commensurate supervisory actions” against the bank after gathering the facts.
In February last year, MAS imposed additional capital requirements amounting to about S$930 million on DBS related to the November 2021 disruption.
In its statement issued late on Wednesday, MAS, which regulates financial institutions in the banking, capital markets, insurance and payments sectors, further stated that DBS has fallen short of its expectations to maintain high system availability and ensure its IT systems are recovered expeditiously.
MAS also said it “takes seriously the reliability of banks’ critical IT systems”, and pointed out that it has instructed the lender to conduct a thorough investigation to find out the root cause of Wednesday’s disruption and submit its investigation findings.
After the regulator issued its statement, DBS chief executive officer Piyush Gupta acknowledged the gravity of the situation and expressed “deep regret” for causing inconvenience to customers.
“We hold ourselves to higher standards and it is our utmost priority to review the events of today,” he said.
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DBS’ digibank and PayLah services were down from early this morning, and were only restored at 5.45 pm, the bank said in a statement at 7.30 pm.
DBS said of the glitch that lasted the entire business day and affected its digibank Mobile and Online, DBS PayLah and DBS mTrading services: “We are closely monitoring the situation. We appreciate your patience and are sorry for the inconvenience caused.”
Checks by The Business Times at 9.45 am found that attempts to log in to the DBS digibank app were met with “Reset pin” prompts. Login attempts to DBS PayLah also yielded a “Service not available” notice.
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The bank said on its Facebook page that as at 10.20 am, access to digibank online and on mobile, as well as PayLah, was unavailable.
It added that its systems “remain secure and uncompromised”. Bank customers can also continue to use DBS and POSB cards for transactions.
As at 12.49 pm, DBS said that access to its digibank services, DBS Vickers mTrading and DBS PayLah was intermittent, and that some users could experience slowness during login.
At 4.50 pm, DBS said access to its digital services was still unavailable, and that it would extend banking services at all its DBS and POSB branches and Treasures Centres by two hours on Wednesday.
Last Friday, DBS PayLah app users faced delays in receiving cashback after making payments under its DBS 5 Million Hawker Meals initiative, which offers S$3 meal subsidies on Fridays from Feb 10 to Jan 19, 2024.
When DBS was slapped with additional capital requirements last February, MAS had said that it noted deficiencies in the lender’s incident management and recovery procedures to restore its digital banking services to a normal state, resulting in the prolonged duration of the disruption.
In May last year, the regulator also imposed more capital requirements amounting to an additional S$330 million on OCBC for deficiencies in its response to a wave of spoofed SMS phishing scams in December 2021.
DBS shares closed 0.1 per cent or S$0.03 lower at S$33.59 on Wednesday.
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