Singapore’s central bank has removed restrictions on non-essential IT services that were placed on DBS Bank following a series of disruptive outages affecting the bank’s payment and ATM services last year.
In May of the previous year, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) implemented additional capital requirements on DBS after a series of widespread outages and subsequent disruptions to its digital banking and ATM services. The bank faced further consequences in November after a data center failure impacted its online and payment services.
As a result of an independent investigation into the March 2023 downtime, which revealed shortcomings in system resilience, incident management, and technology risk governance, a six-month hiatus on non-essential IT services was enforced in November.
In its announcement regarding the lifting of these restrictions, MAS stated: “The six-month pause on DBS Bank’s non-essential activities was to ensure that the bank focused on restoring the resilience of its digital banking services. Although the full implementation of the remediation plan is still underway, MAS notes that DBS Bank has made significant progress in addressing the issues that caused service disruptions for its customers in 2023. Improvements have been made in technology risk governance, system resilience, change management, and incident management.”
DBS Bank will continue its remediation efforts, including longer-term measures focused on simplifying and strengthening its systems architecture.
To mitigate the risk of further disruptions, MAS will maintain a capital multiplier of 1.8 times on DBS Bank’s risk-weighted assets for operational risk. The central bank expects the bank to swiftly recover its services and effectively communicate with its customers in the event of service interruptions. The multiplier will be lifted when MAS is satisfied that DBS Bank has demonstrated consistent service availability, reliability, and the capability to manage disruptions effectively.