SINGAPORE – The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has instructed DBS Bank and Citibank to investigate their failure to fully recover their systems within its required timeframe during last Saturday’s service disruption.
The authority would then take “appropriate supervisory actions after gathering the necessary facts”, it said on Thursday in response to media queries.
Customers of both banks were unable to use their online and mobile services during the recent disruption, which began last Saturday afternoon.
“MAS requires all banks to ensure that their critical systems and services to customers are resilient to disruption,” said a spokesman for the authority.
“Banks are required to have in place backup data centres and systems, and test them periodically to ensure that critical systems and services can be restored within four hours following an outage. In addition, the unscheduled downtime for a critical system affecting a bank’s operations or service to customers must not exceed four hours within any 12-month period.”
MAS added that it does not have oversight of data centres. Instead, it expects banks to establish contractual agreements with data centre providers that include the authority’s requirements on system availability.
The authority acknowledged that both DBS and Citibank had activated their backup data centres when their primary data centres malfunctioned last Saturday.
But the banks did not fully recover their systems within the required timeframe, it added.
It reminded the public that no IT system is infallible, and that banks and customers should have backup plans for service disruptions caused by IT disruptions.
“The banks activated contingency measures, such as extension of branch hours and alternative arrangements for credit card transactions, to reduce the impact on customers,” said MAS.
“Customers can benefit from having alternative payment providers and carrying some cash as a contingency. During this recent service disruption, many affected customers with alternative payment providers were able to switch to those or to using cash, minimising inconvenience.”
