The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has appointed an external expert data technologies (IT) firm to carry out a unique audit of the complete IT infrastructure of HDFC Bank.
In a notification to the exchanges, the lender stated the audit will be carried out beneath Section 30 (1-B) of the Banking Regulation Act, 1949, at the expense of HDFC Bank beneath Section 30 (1-C) of the Act. “The Bank shall accordingly extend its cooperation to the external professional IT firm so appointed by RBI for conducting the special IT audit as above,” the notification stated.
On December 2, 2020, RBI had barred HDFC Bank from launching any new digital initiatives and issuing fresh credit cards. The penalty was issued in view of repeated outages at the bank’s information centres. In a current post-benefits get in touch with, the bank management stated it has envisaged two legs to its action program for remedying its digital method. One is its cloud method, which requires a 12-18-month program, and the other entails the implementation of other elements of the program more than 10 to 12 weeks.
After the implementation of the brief-term method, the lender anticipated RBI to inspect its progress.
The bank stated it opened two million new accounts for the duration of the December quarter and the RBI directive to cease issuing new credit cards has not impacted its deposit accretion. More than two-thirds of its credit card accounts come from its current liability base.
Srinivasan Vaidyanathan, chief monetary officer, HDFC Bank, stated, “We haven’t seen any kind of an impact on that sense on an immediate basis, but to the extent that these are all temporary, we should get back and we know that the life cycle of a card to become a little meaningful is actually a two-year journey.”
In the meantime, the bank has to run programmes for activation and engagement. “There is enough room for having various intervention programmes to accelerate,” Vaidyanathan told analysts, adding, “It depends on what sort of programmes we implement at what time period so that we can crunch this build-up life cycle to a shorter one as we go along.”