A look at past bank outages in Singapore, and their consequences
Bryan Kow
ON Wednesday (Mar 29), DBS’ digital banking services were disrupted for the entire business day. The glitch affected its Digibank and PayLah mobile apps, its website and its mobile trading services.
The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) called the disruption “unacceptable”, and said it will take “commensurate supervisory actions” against the bank after it has gathered the necessary facts.
DBS chief executive Piyush Gupta also expressed “deep regret” for the inconvenience to customers.
The latest outage comes a few months before MAS’ tightened guidelines for the responses by financial institutions (FIs) to service disruptions take effect. The regulator had announced the revised guidelines last June, following widespread disruptions in Singapore’s banking sector.
From Jun 6, 2023, FIs will be required to set out recovery times and strategies for critical services, conduct regular audits, and establish a crisis management structure.
Given that fewer banking services are available at physical bank branches these days, and the falling number of branches, digital disruptions have a greater impact than ever.
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Here is a recap of the last time each local bank experienced an outage, and how the authorities dealt with them.
DBS’ worst digital disruption in a decade (2021)
Singapore’s largest bank suffered its worst digital disruption in a decade when digital banking services were down for two days from Nov 23 to 25, 2021.
DBS said the disruption was due to a problem with its access control servers.
MAS noted deficiencies in the bank’s incident management and recovery procedures when restoring digital banking services, which prolonged the disruption.
Following the incident, the financial regulator imposed additional capital requirements amounting to around S$930 million on DBS. It required DBS to apply a multiplier of 1.5 times to its risk-weighted assets for operational risk.
Higher capital requirements may, in theory, reduce a bank’s lending capacity, require it to take less risk with its capital, or reduce the amount available for dividends.
MAS also directed DBS to appoint an independent expert to conduct a comprehensive review of the incident, including the bank’s recovery actions.
In 2010, the financial regulator applied a multiplier of 1.2 times for a similar disruption at DBS – equivalent to about S$230 million in additional regulatory capital.
OCBC’s online payment services disrupted (2022)
On Jun 9 last year, a “technical issue” affected OCBC Bank’s online payment services. Other services continued to be available.
An OCBC spokesperson said the disruption occurred from around 3 pm to 5.45 pm, but did not mention the number of customers affected.
MAS did not comment nor impose a fine on OCBC for this incident.
UOB’s mobile app troubles (2022)
On Feb 4, 2022, UOB’s TMRW mobile app users were unable to log in or make transactions for several hours. Disruptions began around 3pm. All services were restored by the next morning.
Internet banking and ATM services remained available.
A MAS spokesperson told The Business Times that the regulator was “following up with the bank on the root cause of the incident”.
There were no reports of penalties imposed on UOB after the disruption.
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