SINGAPORE – DBS Bank has apologised to its shareholders and customers for a disruption to its digital banking services.

Singapore’s largest bank said during its annual general meeting (AGM) on Friday that it will also set up a special board committee to look into the cause of the disruption, which left many of its customers unable to carry out their online banking activities on Wednesday.

Chief executive Piyush Gupta said the disruption, the second incident in 16 months, has been sobering for DBS.

“As such a well-known digital and technology bank, this embarrasses us. We are committed to doing better,” he said.

“Ensuring uninterrupted digital banking services 24/7 has been our key priority. Unfortunately, we fell short of it and are truly sorry,” he said during the AGM, which saw DBS chairman Peter Seah bowing to shareholders to show his regret at the incident.

Customers of Singapore’s largest bank were unable to access DBS digibank online and mobile services, as well as the popular PayLah app and investment platform DBS Vickers, from early Wednesday morning. The disruption lasted until about 5.30pm, the bank said on Friday.

Mr Gupta said that after the previous incident in 2021, the bank had worked with independent experts to strengthen its recovery protocols, shore up its engineering team and better understand its third-party systems.

“But unfortunately, it was not enough,” he said, adding that only 40 per cent to 50 per cent of its customers could access its online services on Wednesday.

He added that the bank decided to carry out the next stage of its recovery protocols after lunchtime. This involved firing up its backup servers – a process that took nearly two hours and required “complete downtime”.

The bank fully restored its digital services around 5.30pm.

A thorough review of the incident is under way, and it is still too early to figure out what the exact problem was, said Mr Gupta.

Mr Seah called the incident “very unfortunate and disappointing”.

“Our customers have every right to expect more of us. So, underscoring the gravity of the matter, we will be convening a special board committee with immediate effect to conduct a full and detailed investigation of the incident.”

The committee will include board members – independent director Olivier Lim; board audit committee chairman Tham Sai Choy; tech expert and veteran banker Bonghan Cho; and Mr Chng Kai Fong, who also sits on the board of the Government Technology Agency.

“In addition to these four, we will engage external experts with broad and deep experience in overseeing large-scale IT systems and operations to work with the committee. I have full confidence that they will be thorough and exacting in their review and recommendations,” said Mr Seah.

Mr Gupta added that the bank’s management will provide the necessary support to the special board committee.

In response to queries about the latest disruption, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) called it “unacceptable”, and said it takes seriously the reliability of banks’ critical IT systems.

DBS has fallen short of the regulator’s expectations to “maintain high system availability and ensure its IT systems are recovered expeditiously”, MAS said on Wednesday.

The regulator added that it has instructed the bank to conduct a thorough investigation to establish the root cause of the disruption and submit the findings. 

“MAS will take the commensurate supervisory actions after gathering the necessary facts,” it said.

Wednesday’s disruption was the latest in a spate of incidents in recent years where the lender found itself in hot water over its digital banking services.

DBS was slapped with a requirement to set aside an additional $930 million in regulatory capital last year following a widespread outage of its digital banking services in November 2021. A malfunctioning access control server had disrupted services for DBS and POSB users over three days, resulting in the bank’s worst digital disruption in a decade.

This amount was also four times higher than the $230 million DBS had to set aside for a similar disruption of its digital banking services in 2010.

DBS also came under fire in June 2021 over a payment processing glitch that caused some customers to be charged twice for transactions made on credit and debit cards. Those affected received automatic refunds.

On March 24 this year, PayLah users also faced delays in receiving their cashback when they made payments in hopes of claiming a $3 meal subsidy offered by the bank. These delays were caused by a high volume of logins, the bank said then.