Singapore DBS’s Digital Services Hit Days After MAS Ban Ends

Tassia Sipahutar, Bloomberg News

A DBS Group building in Singapore.

, Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- DBS Group Holdings Ltd. was hit by renewed disruptions to its Internet banking and payment services in Singapore on Thursday, days after a six-month ban by the island’s central bank over similar glitches ended.

“We are aware that our customers are experiencing issues with DBS/POSB digibank Online and Mobile, DBS PayLah!,” the lender said in a statement on Facebook, adding that it had identified the issue.

Complaints about the service disruption surged from about 5:40 p.m. local time on the Downdetector website, which tracks online outages. The bank later said that services were back to normal as of 8 p.m. local time.

The disruptions came two days after Singapore’s financial regulator announced an end to the six-month ban on non-essential activities by the country’s biggest bank.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore had lifted the ban this week, citing improvements and progress to overcome shortcomings. Earlier Thursday, the lender delivered better-than-expected results thanks to strong lending and wealth fees, sending its shares up by 1.9% at close. That lifted DBS’s market capitalization to S$101 billion ($74 billion), making it the first Singapore-listed company to cross that threshold.

While the MAS has imposed penalties on DBS including higher capital requirements totaling S$1.6 billion for similar service disruptions since 2022, the regulator’s action last year including the ban was the most stringent to-date. DBS separately slashed Chief Executive Officer Piyush Gupta’s 2023 compensation by S$4.1 million following the outages.

--With assistance from Chanyaporn Chanjaroen.

(Updates with statement on service resumption in the third paragraph.)