DBS Group Holdings Ltd. said access to its PayLah! mobile wallet is intermittent as of Friday morning and recommended that customers use alternative payment methods.
“Meanwhile, you may use DBS digibank Scan & Pay & DBS/POSB debit or credit cards for your payments,” the Singapore-based lender said in a Facebook post, adding that it is resolving the issue.
This 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 and Ishika Mookerjee.
(Updates with details throughout.)
