Banks face tech resilience test as Covid-19 boosts digital services

Between April 2020 and January 2021, mobile banking transaction volumes doubled to 39 million, while internet banking transaction volumes grew 60 per cent to 7 million

• Early this month, 80-90 per cent of SMSs and OTP messages failed to get delivered when telecom service operators implemented the template registration and scrubbing regulations formulated by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) to eliminate spam and fraudulent commercial communications. 
• In December last year, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) had pulled up HDFC Bank over outages and asked the bank to stop all new launches in digital services.

Why did the outages happen? While Indian banks have no doubt been investing in technology to scale up their digital banking capabilities, the technical glitches are due in part to