On Monday, OCBC, Southeast Asia’s fourth-largest bank, experienced a brief outage affecting its digital and card banking services. At 9:43 a.m. Singapore time, the bank acknowledged the issue via a Facebook post, citing “technical problems impacting our banking channels.” Approximately an hour later, at 10:37 a.m., OCBC reported that card and branch services had been restored, followed by ATM services. As a result, shares of the Singapore-headquartered bank rose by 1.05% in afternoon trading. OCBC moved quickly to reassure its customers that there had been no security breach and that their funds and customer data remained secure throughout the technical problem. An OCBC spokesperson stated, “We are investigating the cause of the technical problem and will provide an update as soon as we can,” in response to inquiries from CNBC.
This incident comes in the wake of similar disruptions at other Singaporean banks. In May, Singapore’s largest bank, DBS, faced additional capital requirements imposed by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) due to service disruptions in February and March. MAS deemed the March outage “unacceptable” and stated that DBS had “fallen short of expectations.” Consequently, DBS was required to apply a multiplier of 1.8 times its risk-weighted assets for operational risk, resulting in an additional regulatory capital of approximately 1.6 billion Singapore dollars, equivalent to $1.2 billion.
