DBS sets up special board committee to investigate service outage

SINGAPORE: DBS has set up a special board committee to investigate the recent disruption to its digital services.

DBS chairman Peter Seah revealed this at an annual general meeting on Friday (Mar 31), adding that the bank will engage external experts to look into the matter.

The day-long outage on Wednesday left customers of Singapore’s biggest bank unable to log in to online banking platforms such as its PayLah! mobile wallet, from as early as 830am. The bank later said in an evening update that digital services had returned to normal as of 5.45pm.

This is DBS’ second outage in 16 months. The previous incident in November 2021 lasted two days and was deemed a “serious disruption” by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS).

The authority issued a strongly-worded statement following the outage on Wednesday, calling the latest disruption “unacceptable”.

The bank has “fallen short” of MAS’ expectations to maintain “high system availability and ensure its IT systems are recovered expeditiously”, said a spokesperson.

At the annual general meeting on Friday, DBS chief executive Piyush Gupta also said that it benefited from inflows amounting to a “few hundred millions” in the aftermath of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank.

He did not specify a currency for the inflows.

He added DBS had generally been benefiting from safe-haven inflows into Singapore since last year, which had been boosted by the recent banking crisis in the West.

Singapore has been attracting wealth, especially from China, in recent years by being one of the first Asian cities to significantly ease pandemic restrictions, on top of its tax-friendly regime and being seen as politically stable.