HDFC Bank has complied with 85 per cent of RBI’s asks on technology, and the ball is now in the regulator’s court on when to lift the ban on issuing new credit cards, its managing director and chief executive Sashidhar Jagdishan said on Saturday.

Addressing shareholders at his first annual general meeting as the executive head of the largest private sector lender, Jagdishan said a technology audit is also over and the RBI will now be “independently” taking a view on when to lift the penal actions taken against the bank. Frustrated at repeated tech outages at HDFC Bank, the RBI took an unprecedented action against the lender in December 2020, putting a freeze on it issuing any new credit card, a segment in which it was a market leader, and also barring it from introducing any new digital offerings.

Acknowledging that the bank has lost market share in the credit card segment because of the ban, Jagdishan said tech outages are a global phenomenon but it is the time taken to recover from a setback where the bank erred, leading to the “rap on the knuckles” from the regulator. He added that over the last few months, the technology team has worked on this aspect of being able to invoke disaster recovery on time and the confidence of responding to any situations is very high now. The bank is working on a project to take all of its back-end work to the cloud but has to contend with legacy systems in the interim, he said, adding that there is a board committee looking into the IT aspect.

News Source : Business Standard