Safe banking: HDFC Bank makes big investment to upgrade technology

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New Delhi: Having faced multiple episodes of digital banking glitches in the last two years, HDFC Bank has embarked on a ‘Technology Transformation Agenda’ to provide safe and secure banking services to its customers. HDFC Bank managing director Sashi Jagdishan in a letter to employees said the bank has faced five instances of downtime in 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 two years.

Bank penalised

The bank was penalised by the RBI for two major outages, one in November 2018, and the other in December 2019. Taking a stern view of the repeated outages, RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das had said in December that the regulator had some concerns about certain deficiencies and it was necessary that HDFC 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.

Giving 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 added.

Monitoring strengthened

As part of the agenda, he said, the bank has strengthened the process of monitoring the Data Centre (DC) and has shifted key applications to new DC.

“We have strengthened our firewalls further. We have to be scanning the horizon for potential security issues and be ever prepared to face them. We haven’t had any security issues in the past. But this is always an important area of focus and action plans are underway for further robustness,” the letter said.

The country’s largest private sector lender assured employees that their bonuses, promotions and increments are safe like last year despite COVID-19 challenges.

“In the current financial year, there will be some pandemic related challenges for sure. The beauty of this organisation is the ability to rally around, tap the opportunities and grow. The story of the Bank will not be any different in this financial year and in the coming times,” he said in his address.

The bank will continue to invest in resources to grow in the identified segments or sectors and geographies, it added. “Business objectives should be driven keeping in mind the 3Cs that I wrote about in my last communication to you. It is Culture, Conscience and Customers. Continue to keep the humility quotient (HQ) high and make it part of your DNA,” he said.