The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) had ordered HDFC Bank in December 2020 to stop issuing new digital banking initiatives and new credit cards. This ban on the country’s largest private sector bank was imposed due to technical glitches.
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has allowed the issuance of new credit cards, partially removing the restrictions imposed on HDFC Bank (HDFC) on 2 December 2020. In fact, last year, the customers of the country’s largest private sector bank had to face technical glitches several times. This affected the banking services. Following this, the RBI ordered HDFC Bank to stop the new digital banking initiative and issuance of new credit cards.
HDFC Bank had added more than 1 lakh credit card customers every month during April-November 2020, before the RBI ban imposed by the central bank third party IT infra audit . In February 2021, the central bank appointed an outside company to conduct a special audit of the bank’s IT infrastructure.
HDFC Bank Chief Information Officer Ramesh Laxminarayanan said in June 2021 that the private bank has completed all the assessments. Also, all the technical flaws have been removed. Now the central bank has to take a decision on lifting the ban.
HDFC Bank had fulfilled the conditions in July 2021.
HDFC Bank was the market leader in the credit card sector till the ban was imposed. However, in the previous two years, many times, due to technical glitches in the system in Internet and Mobile Banking, customers had to face a lot of problems. Many times the bank had to stop online operations. Because of this, the Reserve Bank had banned HDFC Bank from issuing new credit cards and introducing new digital offerings.
Last month, HDFC Bank MD and CEO Shashidhar Jagadeesan had said that the bank has completed compliance with the technology-related instructions. Now the matter of removing the ban on issuing new credit cards is in the court of the Reserve Bank.