“Embarrassed” DBS chairman bows to apologise and sets up special committee to look into service disruption

SINGAPORE: Expressing embarrassment over the latest digital banking service outage, DBS CEO Piyush Gupta and chairman Peter Seah apologised to stakeholders at the bank’s annual general meeting (AGM) on Friday (31 Mar) and promised to set up a special committee to look into the disruption.

About 50 per cent of all DBS customers could not access Digibank or PayLah services during the 11-hour service outage on Wednesday (29 Mar).

At Friday’s AGM, DBS CEO Piyush Gupta said that the incident, the second in 16 months, was a sobering experience for Singapore’s largest bank as it had previously taken steps to improve its recovery protocols and engineering team.

He said, “As such a well-known digital and technology bank, this embarrasses us. We are committed to doing better. Ensuring uninterrupted digital banking services 24/7 has been our key priority. Unfortunately, we fell short of it and are truly sorry.”

DBS chairman Peter Seah bowed to shareholders as he apologised and expressed regret over the “very unfortunate and disappointing” incident.

Revealing that he will lead a special committee to conduct a thorough investigation of the outage, Mr Seah said:

“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 Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has deemed the incident “unacceptable” and has instructed the bank to investigate the root cause of the disruption.

This was not the first time DBS had experienced digital banking service disruptions. The bank was required to set aside $930 million in regulatory capital last year after a widespread outage.