HDFC Bank Ltd, India’s biggest private sector lender, is looking to replace its legacy credit card system with a modern technology platform, according to a report.
The bank wants to make the processes more efficient and cost-effective and give customers a better experience and more security.
It is in talks with FinTech firms such as Zeta and Sprinklr for the upgrade.
Zeta, a software service provider for Sodexo’s employee benefits and rewards programme, helps banks to launch modern retail and FinTech products.
HDFC Bank, which has been hit by several digital glitches since the past year, has embarked on a scale changing technology adoption and transformation agenda to help drive its ambitious future growth plans.
RBI ban on credit card issue
The RBI had temporarily barred HDFC Bank in December 2020, from launching new digital banking initiatives and issuing new credit cards after taking a serious note of service outages at the lender over the last two years.
The bank was penalised by the RBI for two major outages, one in November 2018, and the other in December 2019.
Taking a stern view of the repeated outages, RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das had said in December that the regulator had some concerns about certain deficiencies and it was necessary that HDFC Bank strengthens its IT system before expanding further.
Technology transformation
Following this, the bank embarked on a scale changing technology adoption and transformation agenda to help drive future growth plans.
Giving details of the Technology Transformation Agenda, Jagdishan said that the bank has invested heavily in the infrastructure to handle any potential load that it might encounter in the next 3 to 5 years.
“We are also in the process of accelerating our cloud strategy to be on the cutting edge leveraging best in class cloud service providers,” he added.
As part of the agenda, he said, the bank has strengthened the process of monitoring the Data Centre (DC) and has shifted key applications to new DC.
“We have strengthened our firewalls further. We have to be scanning the horizon for potential security issues and be ever prepared to face them. We haven”t had any security issues in the past. But this is always an important area of focus and action plans are underway for further robustness,” the letter said.