NEW DELHI: Having faced at least five instances of downtime during the past 28 months, the country’s largest private lender HDFC Bank is now working on a “Technology Transformation Agenda” for its customers. These include initiatives towards infrastructure scalability, disaster recovery, security enhancements and monitoring enhancements, HDFC Bank CEO and managing director, Sashidhar Jagdishan, said in a letter to the bank’s employees.
“While we execute this Technology Transformation Agenda, there will sometimes be pain and outages beyond our control. We must doubly resolve to reach out proactively to our customers / stakeholders and explain the path that we are traversing to make their experience with us smoother, faster and better,” Jagdishan wrote.
“We have always raised the bar when it comes to delivering customer experience. It is in this context, one has to see the advisories and strictures by the regulators calling for accelerated adoption and process changes. We are working with them closely to overcome the current situation,” Jagdishan said.
It may be noted that the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has temporarily barred HDFC Bank from launching new digital banking initiatives and issuing new credit cards after taking a serious note of service outages at the lender. The bank was penalised by the RBI for two major outages, one in November 2018, and the other in December 2019.
Meanwhile, however, the bank said it has invested heavily in the scale-up of its infrastructure to handle any potential load that it will encounter for the next three to five years. The bank is also in the process of accelerating the cloud strategy, noted Jagdishan.