DBS Bank chief offers public apology for its service disruption

The apology comes in response to a notice issued by Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), which stated its concerns regarding the disruption and asked for ‘a full account of the incident to the public, including the actions it will take to prevent future recurrence.’

Attributing the reasons to a botched repair job conducted by IBM, the bank stated that it will work closely with its IT and infrastructure partner to conduct a full-scale investigation.

While the MAS has not ruled out supervisory action, it expects banks to comply with its Internet banking and technology risk management (IBTRM) guidelines, which states '24 hours every day of the year' accessibility and allows no more than five minutes of downtime a year.

Stacey Hara, director of Corporate & Finance practice for Ogilvy PR Singapore says that the public apology from Gupta was well-received and shows that the bank does take such incidents seriously from the top management level.

However, she believes that the letter should ideally have been issued last week, to assure customers that it is taking a proactive approach in addressing such events.

“Speed is of the essence,” Hara said. “A company's response is acknowledged for the speed at which it reacted to a situation. Even though the bank set up a Twitter page, its social media footprint was not large enough. Also, as Gupta states, DBS could have used broadcast mediums to propagate the message.”   

 "A malfunction at a service level affects a brand, and that is a given," added Joseph Baladi, CEO of Brand Asia. "However, what constitutes a brand is its brand delivery and each company must have redundancies in place to deliver that promise."