The world’s best digital bank – digital to the core, as the bank’s own branding has it – has faced a period of disruption so severe that it has attracted the attention of the regulators.
DBS, which has won Euromoney’s global digital award more often than any other bank, has built its name on its technological excellence. But on Tuesday it was hit by a series of outages affecting the its consumer website and mobile app.
The bank had fixed most of the issues by Thursday morning. But by this time the disruption had become the worst outage since 2010. And the Monetary Authority of Singapore had taken notice.
“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,” said MAS assistant managing director of banking and insurance Marcus Lim. “MAS will consider appropriate supervisory actions following the investigation.”
Shee Tse Koon, DBS's Singapore country head, had taken to Facebook with a contrite tone earlier that day, saying: “I realise this is a cause for concern and frustration and I’m very sorry.”