DBS May Face Regulatory Action Over Outage

The Monetary Authority of Singapore said it will consider appropriate supervisory actions on DBS, which suffered recurring disruptions to its online banking services, including its payments app.

This is a serious disruption and MAS expects DBS to conduct a thorough investigation to identify the root causes and implement the necessary remedial measures, Marcus Lim, MAS’ assistant managing director (banking and insurance), said in a statement.

The regulator said the bank informed it about a problem with its access control servers that resulted in customers experiencing difficulties logging on to its digital banking services.

Lim said MAS expects all financial institutions to have systems and processes to ensure the consistent availability of financial services to their customers.

This week, DBS faced two consecutive days of disruptions to its online banking services, marking the worst outage for the Singapore lender since its ATM glitch in 2010.

DBS Singapore country head Shee Tse Koon apologized for the outage in a video posted on the bank’s website and various social media pages on Wednesday afternoon.

The bank also extended services at its branches for two hours and encouraged customers to use its phone banking services. In the meantime, I want to assure you that your deposits and monies are safe, Shee said.