Singapore’s DBS says mobile wallet services back to normal
By Yi Wei Wong and Chanyaporn Chanjaroen
(Bloomberg) — DBS Group Holdings Ltd. said PayLah! services were back to normal after access to the mobile wallet was intermittent on Friday morning.
“We would like to update customers that as of 11.40am, PayLah! services have returned to normal,” DBS said in a Facebook post on Friday.
The incident comes days after the bank experienced an outage on Oct. 14 that lasted hours due to a data-center failure. Customers of DBS and a local unit of Citigroup Inc had said they were unable to use credit cards or complete other online transactions.
The disruption on Oct. 14 could weaken DBS’s performance related to the environment, social and governance aspects, said Bloomberg Intelligence Sarah Jane Mahmud. “The bank should have strengthened systems after a probe into three prior outages resulted in S$1.6 billion of extra-regulatory capital charges,” she said.
DBS shares were down as much as 0.9% versus a 0.6% decline in the Bloomberg Asia Pacific Banks Index.
The Monetary Authority of Singapore has instructed DBS and Citi Singapore to investigate the causes of the disruption and said it will “take appropriate supervisory actions after gathering the necessary facts.”
Local banks are required to maintain and test backup facilities so that “critical systems and services” can be restored within four hours following an outage, the regulator said Thursday.
—With assistance from Serene Cheong, Ishika Mookerjee and Janine Phakdeetham.
©2023 Bloomberg L.P.
