HDFC Bank said that the reason behind the disruption in its mobile and internet banking services in December was high transaction volumes. It has also dismissed the rumour of a cyber attack. It added that the same had been communicated to the banking regulator.

The lender also said that it was adding more capacities to the bank’s payments system to avoid such instances going ahead.

The bank said that it underestimated the growth in volumes across payment products through multiple channels like cards, Unified Payments Interface (UPI).

“One would have normally envisaged that from the base level, you normally size up for about four to five times the capacity,” said Sashidhar Jagdishan, executive director, HDFC Bank. He added that the volumes had gone beyond five times the bank’s estimation. “So, it’s more of a capacity issue,” he said.

The private lender said that it had added more capacities and would continue to do so in the coming months.

While HDFC did not specify exactly what in terms of more ‘capacities’ it will be adding, typically, a bank could require increasing the number of servers, boosting internet bandwidth apart from reviewing the existing processing capacity of its solutions, payment gateways, network monitoring and regulation.

HDFC Bank’s retail banking business is supported by Finware and corporate banking business by Flexcube, which are the systems developed by i-Flex Solutions. Both systems are open, scaleable and web-enabled, according to the bank.

In December, the bank’s customers took to social media to complain about not being able to access their accounts online or through the bank’s mobile application, raising safety concerns.

Jagdishan said that the bank was monitoring the situation closely. “I can categorically say, and we have said it to the regulator as well, that there was no cyberattack on 2 December,” he added while speaking to analysts in the third quarter earnings call on January 18.

On December 2, the bank issued a statement saying that some of its customers were facing ‘intermittent issues’ while accessing the NetBanking and MobileBanking app.

“We apologise that the resolution of the technical glitch is taking more time than anticipated,” HDFC Bank said on its social media account.

However, this is not the first time that the lender has faced issues in mobile banking. In December 2018, the bank’s new mobile banking app went down and the outage lasted for a week causing inconvenience to customers. This happened while the lender was in the process of upgrading the app.

“It is taking us longer than anticipated, but we are confident we’ll be able to fix the issue at the earliest and you’ll be able to use the new app,” the bank said.

With rising awareness and improving payments infrastructure, a large number of transactions are carried out through mobile and internet banking in India.

To get a perspective, the country witnessed transactions close to Rs 5 trillion via mobile and Rs 22 trillion through internet banking channels in November, according to the latest data from the Reserve Bank of India.

HDFC Bank has a customer base of more than 49 million and over 90 percent of its retail transactions are initiated via internet and mobile.