Singapore regulators to investigate DBS Digital Services

After customers lost access to accounts using mobile-phone apps and websites, the financial regulators of Singapore pledged to take action against DBS Group Holdings Ltd. in a second major incident in 16 months.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore ordered an investigation after a 10 hour delay on Wednesday. The country's largest bank regrets the inconvenience, said Chief Executive Officer Piyush Gupta.

The MAS said the latest outage was unacceptable after the November 2021 episode. The regulators said that DBS did not meet expectations to maintain high system availability and to make sure its IT systems are recovered quickly.

In the past decade, the city-state regulators ordered DBS to set aside S $930 million $700 million of regulatory capital after the 2021 episode left thousands of customers unable to log onto its digital platforms for at least two days. The bank's access control servers are responsible for the issues at the time.

Financial institutions need to make sure that the maximum unscheduled downtime for each critical system doesn't exceed four hours within a 12-month period.

According to Sarah Jane Mahmud, a Bloomberg Intelligence analyst, said that any action would not be seen until the third quarter because of the extra capital charge on DBS, given expectations that it would have already taken steps to address problems in its digital-banking systems and controls.

She said the bank is likely to see a move of deposit accounts to its key competitors, given consumer discontent with the two major outages.

The DBS shares fell by as much as 1.7% Thursday, compared with the 0.4% drop in the Bloomberg Asia Pacific Banks Index.

Singapore has been relying on payments via mobile phones, which has reducing cash usage, like many other countries around the world.

Customers began reporting issues with the bank's digital services a little after 7 a.m. local time Wednesday, according to Downdetector. The bank said in a Facebook post that services returned to normal around 5: 45 pm. A bank spokesman clarified that the issue was limited to Singapore, as it extended branch operations by two hours as it worked to recover digital services.

Gupta said we appreciate our customers' understanding and deeply regret the inconvenience caused by the situation.

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