Singapore – The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has imposed a six-month pause of DBS Banks’ non-essential services in order to allow the bank to focus more on the essential service of restoring its system resilience, following a slew of prolonged outages and disruptions in the bank’s systems.
Suspended non-essential services include acquiring new business ventures during this period or reducing the size of its branch and ATM networks in Singapore.
The imposed pause was the result of when MAS directed DBS to conduct a third-party independent review of the bank’s systems back in April this year. Through the review, they identified several shortcomings on the bank’s systems which included system resilience, incident management, change management, and technology risk governance and oversight.
Following the independent review, DBS Bank has set out a technology resiliency roadmap to address the shortcomings, improve system resilience, and better position the bank to meet future digital banking needs. The roadmap is being implemented in phases, with the changes affecting its system architecture design taking more time to complete.
Moreover, MAS will review the progress made by DBS Bank on its remediation efforts at the end of six months. MAS may extend the duration of the measures, vary the additional capital requirement currently imposed, or take further actions at that point.
Ho Hern Shin, deputy managing director for financial supervision at MAS, said, “DBS must put in place immediate measures to ensure service reliability while it continues to invest in the longer-term efforts to bolster its operational resilience. We have imposed this six-month pause on the bank to give it the space to take the actions needed to maintain customer trust.”
Following the said statement, DBS has issued an official apology related to its series of digital disruptions, while promising that a roadmap that includes measures to strengthen technology governance, people/leadership, systems and processes is now rolling.
DBS Chairman Peter Seah said, “The Board apologises for the digital banking disruptions. When customers bank with us, they expect to be able to access our banking services conveniently, and at any time of the day. With the incidents of the past year, we have failed to live up to these expectations, and have also fallen short of our own standards. As an acknowledgement that the bank could have done better, senior management will be held accountable, and this will be reflected in their compensation.”
He added, “Over the past few months, the bank has been making every effort possible to strengthen our resiliency and business continuity, and to be able to recover more quickly when incidents happen. This is a work in progress, and we seek customers’ patience as we work through our remedial actions.”
