Singapore Imposes Penalties on DBS for Service Outages

By Ben Otto

The Monetary Authority of Singapore won't allow DBS Bank to acquire new business ventures for six months, one of several penalties imposed for what the central bank described as excessive interruptions to banking services this year.

MAS said Wednesday that DBS also won't be allowed to reduce the size of its branch and ATM networks in Singapore until authorities are satisfied with progress on a remediation plan, and cannot make any changes to IT systems except those pertaining to security, regulatory compliance and risk management for six months.

MAS said it took the actions following "the repeated and prolonged disruptions" of DBS's banking services, and that it sought to ensure the bank maintains a "sharp focus on restoring the resilience of its digital banking services."

DBS, one of Southeast Asia's largest lenders by assets, suffered an outage of some services last month that lasted longer than the four hours permitted by MAS, with back-up data centers not performing as required, according to the central bank.

MAS said Wednesday that it would review the progress on DBS's remediation plan in six months, at which point it could extend the measures, vary additional capital requirements or take further actions. It added that DBS will take up to 24 months to implement structural changes, with service disruptions possible until then.

Write to Ben Otto at ben.otto@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

November 01, 2023 06:48 ET (10:48 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.