Global: MAS Lifts Six-Month IT Ban on DBS

Singapore’s central bank has removed restrictions on non-essential IT services imposed on DBS Bank following a series of disruptive outages that affected the bank’s payments and ATM services last year.

In May of the previous year, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) imposed additional capital requirements on DBS in response to widespread outages. Two months later, a subsequent disruption to its digital banking and ATM services led to further reprimand from MAS. In November, following a data center meltdown affecting online and payment services, MAS imposed a six-month hiatus on non-essential IT services following an independent investigation into the March 2023 downtime. The investigation identified shortcomings in system resilience, incident management, change management, and technology risk governance and oversight.

In a statement announcing the lifting of restrictions, MAS emphasized that the six-month pause on DBS Bank’s non-essential activities aimed to ensure the bank’s sharp focus on restoring the resilience of its digital banking services. While full implementation of the remediation plan is ongoing, MAS acknowledged substantive progress by DBS Bank in addressing the identified shortcomings from the service disruptions experienced in 2023. Improvements have been made to technology risk governance, system resilience, change management, and incident management.

Remediation efforts by DBS Bank will continue, with some longer-term measures, such as the continued simplification and strengthening of the bank’s systems architecture, still in progress.

To mitigate the risk of further disruptions, MAS will retain a capital multiplier of 1.8 times to DBS Bank’s risk-weighted assets for operational risk. MAS expects DBS Bank to promptly recover its services and communicate with customers clearly and timely in the event of service disruptions. The multiplier will be lifted when MAS is satisfied that DBS Bank has demonstrated the ability to maintain service availability and reliability and handle disruptions effectively.