Bank Tech Outage Disclosures: A Major Concern?
18-January-2020: Several Founders, Co-Founders, CXO Bankers, CXO Fintech professional & people who participated in the ePanel discussions:
- Mr. Shashank Kumar, Co-Founder at Razorpay
- Mr. Arun Tanksali, Co-founder & CTO, Nearex
- Mr. Rahul Dayal, Head of IT — Aditya Birla Sunlife Asset Management Company
- Mr. Amit Jadhav, Senior Vice President at DBS Bank
- Mr. Muthu Krishnan, General Manager- Merchant Acquisition at India Transact Services Ltd
- Mr. Sandeep Todi, Co-Founder & CMO, Remitr
- Mr. Shailesh Varudkar, VP — Global Business Operations, Vserv
- Mr. Narayan Rao, Chief Services Officer, Suryoday Small Finance Bank
- Mr. Kamonasish Aayush Mazumdar, Chief Marketing Officer, MeraEvents
- Mr. Ajay B Panicker, CEO & Founder, NetPay Limited
- Mr. Suman Gandham, Tech and Innovation Director, Nekko Capital
- Mr. Prasad Likhite, Director at ACI
- Mr. Hemal Vira, Gr Exe Vice President and Head NRI Products, Remittances and International Alliances, YES Bank
- Ms. Kaunain Esmile, Vice President-Country Lead Customer Experience, DBS Bank
- Mr. Rakesh Watal, Senior Vice President, HDFC Bank
- Mr. Hemal Shah, Technical Product Manager, Mastercard
- Mr. Abhishek Mody, Former Associate Director-Payment & Digital Initiatives, IDFC Bank
- Mr. Vikas R Panditrao, Co-Founder, Forum of Industry and Academic Knowledge Sharing (FIAKS)
- Many other CEO/CXO Bankers & Fintech professionals on FIAKS Forum requested to remain anonymous
So, this time the discussion amongst the FIAKS community brewed around this headline- Online banking of HDFC, Kotak Mahindra, Yes Bank, IDFC Collapses; RBI says nothing to panic! [1]
Well, this didn’t sound convincing to the FIAKS community. He found this certainly unprecedented and further questioned, Why didn’t the banks come out with full disclosure like any startup does when there’s a crash? RBI seems to be playing pacifier.
Now coming to the disclosures, Let’s just detail this out a more:
- GitHub, Microsoft, AWS, all of them come up with disclosures. One of the members pointed out that Twitter was down and not a single word was out from them on it.
- So, a layman could just simply think of Google which is down quite often in some service or the other and they never announce.
- Clearing out this misapprehension, Microsoft, AWS is largely B2B platforms and paid services and so customers will force disclosures.
- Also, comparison with Google is not correct as it has a completely different business model hence may or may not disclose.
- But, banking is a much bigger and wider commoner need than any other tool. Banking is such a critical need that it’s all the more necessary!
One of the FIAKS community members cites an error on the HDFC BANK banking portal saying that- “I have tried a few times in the last hour and I don’t seem to be getting the verification image and text on the HDFC online banking page(the one you see after entering the customer id). We are supposed to treat that image/text as proof that we are entering our password on the right site and it being missing is a bad sign.” While some other members also pointed out similar issues regarding malfunctioning of the HDFC platform where the session kept expiring within a minute or two and faced a tough time to stay online even for two minutes. Also, various transactions were done without even receiving OTP.
So many errors but only Yes bank singled out due to falling share price. While in the context of the HDFC collapse a member asserted that it was due to a huge number of concurrent users, mainly due to HDFC festive treat scheme otherwise all servers, etc were up and running. It was a combination of a lot of volumes such as festive offers, month-end pressure, salary processing, and major e-commerce sites — Amazon, Flipkart, etc on sale.
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