Banks need to invest more in IT, tech: RBI Guv on HDFC Bank outage

A day after the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) asked the HDFC Bank to temporarily stop issuing new credit cards and launching new digital businesses activities, RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das has said that all banks and other financial institutions should invest more on their IT systems and technology to avert such inconvenience for the customers and build trust towards digital payments.

"We cannot put lakhs and thousands of customers who are using digital banking into any kind of difficulty for hours together especially when we are ourselves giving so much of emphasis on digital banking. Confidence in digital banking will have to be maintained," Das said during a virtual press conference after the monetary policy meet.

Showing confidence that HDFC Bank would comply to its directive, Das said that there have been previous cases of such issues with the bank and it also has a major presence in the digital payments landscape.

The RBI's order dated December 2 came after outages in the bank's online facilities or payment utilities occurred over the past 2 years, including the recent incident in the internet banking and payment system on November 21, due to a power failure in the primary data centre.

On the latest issue regarding technical glitches faced by the State Bank of India customers, he said that teams in RBI were examining the matter and it is too early to comment on the issue.

"In a general level I would like to say that there is need for all banks and financial institutions to invest more in their IT systems and in technology. If you want to remain competitive in the coming years, technology is the key, robustness of your IT system is the key," he said.