Banks must assess the scalability of their digital banking applications on a regular basis, experts said.
This comes at a time when the twitter handles of various banks have been flooded with complaints over data outages. On Monday, largest lender State Bank of India (SBI) said that some of its digital banking services had been impacted due to a technical glitch. While SBI resolved the issue, similar outages have recently affected services of DBS Bank and HDFC Bank.
“Typically, these outages happen when there is an exponential increase in transaction volumes month-end, quarter-end or year-end, or when there are some upgrades of the application (typically for customer-facing channels like internet banking, mobile banking, etc). It is then that products and services enabled on these channels get impacted or degraded.
Either the IT infrastructure goes down to capacity utilization or the application itself has challenges with handling high, concurrent volumes, or it could be due to a combination of both,” Asim Parashar, partner, PwC India, said. “Resiliency and scalability have to be assessed for their applications (transaction processing and payments) and their underlying infrastructure on a continuous basis.”
A majority of transactions on these banking channels is done through the unified payments interface. A total of 91.9 billion digital transactions were undertaken in April-December, compared with 20.7 billion transactions in 2017-18 (April-March), the latest data from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology showed.
While banks have been focusing on technology investments to enable better customer experience and make operations efficient, a more concerted effort is required to manage the load of rising transactions, said experts.
