The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has appointed an external professional IT company to conduct an audit of HDFC Bank’s IT Infrastructure and has sought a report from the company at the earliest, said a person familiar with the development.
“The RBI has appointed a third party to conduct an audit of the IT infrastructure,” said an official in the bank who didn’t want to be named. This is part of the RBI’s inspections to examine if the bank had improved on its digital capabilities following the recent issues, the person said.
The HDFC bank has also informed the exchanges that the RBI move is in the backdrop of incidents of outages in the internet banking/ mobile banking/ payment utilities of the Bank over the past two years, including the recent outages in the Bank’s internet banking and payment system on November 21, 2020, due to a power failure in the primary data center.
“As an update to the above Intimation, kindly note that RBI has appointed an external professional IT firm for carrying out a special audit of the entire IT infrastructure of the Bank under Section 30 (1-B) of the Banking Regulation Act, 1949 at the cost of the Bank under Section 30 (1-C) of the Act,” the bank told the Exchanges. Further, the Bank shall accordingly extend its cooperation to the external professional IT firm so appointed by RBI for conducting the special IT audit as above, the bank said.
On December 3, HDFC Bank announced that the RBI asked the bank to temporarily stop all launches under its Digital 2.0 initiative and stop sourcing new credit card customers. The announcement came after the bank experienced multiple outages in its internet banking, mobile banking, and payment utility services over the past two years.

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