HDFC Bank to pump up tech; expects to handle load for another three to five years

Troubled by five technical glitches since November 2018, leading private sector lender HDFC Bank plans to transform its technology.

The bank's MD & CEO Sashi Jagdishan on Monday told employees that the bank is in the process of accelerating its cloud strategy and enhancing firewalls, going on to say that the technology could handle the load for the next three to five years.

He went on to address each of the five outages mentioning the reasons for them. He stated that though the new mobile application for the bank had crashed in November 2018 and customers were not able to download, the bank went on to update the application seven times since then without any glitch.

Another incident he noted was the most recent incident of net banking and mobile banking downtime twice in March. He stated, “To put things in perspective, in the last 28 months, we had had 5 instances of downtime. Every instance has hardened our resolve to do better keeping our customers in mind.”

The bank was also pulled up by the banking regulator- Reserve Bank of India (RBI) for these outages. In December 2020, the bank was barred from new digital launches after several outages. The central bank had also asked HDFC Bank not to add more credit card customers.

He further stated that in this financial year, the bank will face some challenges posed by the pandemic. He said, “In my mind, the broad macro-opportunities continue to present themselves across the retail, MSME, and corporate banking for a bank like us and across geographies.”

In his address to the employees of the bank, Jagdishan stated that the bank will follow the normal compensation cycle. “When we said last year that your bonuses, promotions, and increments are safe, it was a small token of our appreciation and a commitment to stand by our employees. This year too, the Bank will follow its normal practice in so far as compensation cycle is concerned,” Jagdishan said.