HDFC Bank to set up 'digital and enterprise factories' to curb outages

Mumbai: HDFC Bank Ltd. will set up digital and enterprise units to strengthen its online infrastructure and handle a larger volume of transactions after customers faced repeated outages.

It plans to hire 500 people from diverse backgrounds—from data analytics and cloud computing to artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning—for the "digital and enterprise factories", according to a statement.

The move is part of its technology transformation agenda.


India's largest private bank, which had 1.2 lakh people on its rolls as of March 31, has been facing flak for repeated outages in the last couple of years . It has also been barred by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) from selling any new credit cards or launching new digital products until those issues are fixed.

The bank had last week said that it continues to stay in touch with the banking regulator for restarting the banned services, but giving a timeline for it will be difficult.

"We are awaiting further directions from the regulator in this matter. We are fully prepared, we have shared all of the required information. We are awaiting further guidance from the regulator in terms of seeing how this will pan out now. I don't have the timelines now, I can't second guess," said Chief Information Officer Ramesh Lakshminarayanan. "We are also working very closely with the regulator and the industry in terms of ensuring that some of the outages we saw, we continue to address them in a fruitful way."