The world’s best digital bank – digital to the core, as the bank’s own branding has it – has faced a period of disruption so severe that it has attracted the attention of the regulators.
DBS, which has won Euromoney’s global digital award more often than any other bank, has built its name on its technological excellence. But on Tuesday it was hit by a series of outages affecting the its consumer website and mobile app.
The bank had fixed most of the issues by Thursday morning. But by this time the disruption had become the worst outage since 2010. And the Monetary Authority of Singapore had taken notice.
“This is a serious disruption and MAS expects DBS to conduct a thorough investigation to identify the root causes and implement the necessary remedial measures,” said MAS assistant managing director of banking and insurance Marcus Lim. “MAS will consider appropriate supervisory actions following the investigation.”
Shee Tse Koon, DBS’s Singapore country head, had taken to Facebook with a contrite tone earlier that day, saying: “I realise this is a cause for concern and frustration and I’m very sorry.”
Access control
Shee said the problem arose with access control servers, and that after working with third-party engineering providers, the problem was addressed by 2am on Wednesday. But, later that morning, they arose again.
This is important because MAS regulations require financial institutions to ensure that the total unscheduled downtime for critical systems affecting services for customers does not exceed four hours within any 12-month period. With some users still taking to Twitter to report problems on Thursday – though the bank claimed services were normal by then – DBS appears to be well in breach of this rule.
The timing is not great: DBS and fellow Singaporean incumbents OCBC and UOB are preparing to face the arrival of digital bank competitors in 2022.
Shee told customers one option open to them while the web apps were down was to go to branches, where opening hours were extended for two hours. But this is not as easy as it once was: DBS has been progressively closing branches and ATMs for years as part of its digital journey.
