Can Downtimes Be Advertisement Opportunities For Tech Partners?

Several Founders, Co-Founders, CXO Bankers, CXO Fintech professional & people who participated in the ePanel discussions:

Mr. Hitesh Thakkar, Fintech Consultant, Self-Service Automation
Mr. Himanshu Khare, former Head Corporate Legal & Advisory, VISPL
Mr. Raj K Prasad, Sr. VP & Head- Trade & Forex Products & Services at Axis Bank
Mr. Ramasubramanian S, Deputy Vice President, Axis Bank
Mr. John Choudhury, Head – Payments, Alliances & Commercial Lending, Flipkart
Mr. Arun Nair, AGM-Business Development, Smart Chip Pvt Ltd
Mr. Vishweshwaran R, Vice President-Business Technology Group at IDFC FIRST Bank
Mr. Vikas R Panditrao, Co-Founder, Forum of Industry and Academic Knowledge Sharing (FIAKS)
Many other CEO/CXO Bankers & Fintech professionals on FIAKS Forum requested to remain anonymous

Bank tech outages are no longer a strange term now. Almost every person must have experienced what it actually is, customers face a lot of inconvenience because of such frequent downtimes. Check this out now after leading private bank, SBI YONO is down. ^[1] YONO down for too long will create a rundown like a situation of the bank in the app world. SBI has introduced an image/audio captcha for additional security which may be causing the issue.

Nowadays it seems many transactions are failing while paying for merchants. The purpose of UPI is defeated now and simply being used for the purpose of transferring within the family and getting cash back. Apparently, there is also some issue with Internet Banking. It’s become very slow and logs you out in the last leg of the transaction. Community discusses the below message being shown to the customers

Well, doesn’t this look like a name and shame strategy?

Forcing a culture of more responsive partners/vendors. While we all know that IBM manages YONO, maybe they want to assure customers that they have engaged a big tech giant who is looking into the matter.
It would be interesting to understand who puts this up SBI or IBM who manages this platform. Well, all messages across channels are reviewed and approved by the business team, and then it is implemented in the system for outage messages. At least for UPI, ATM e-lobby devices like currency acceptor, etc and net banking.
The reality remains, downtimes are no advertisement opportunities for IBM how they take it is the other side of the story!
The banking sector is completely dependent on the vendor for every small tech requirement, Many bank’s DIT wing accommodates more vendor manpower than the bank’s manpower, they do only the price negotiation, nothing else.
In job savers vs entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs will win. And this brings in the whole big question of checks and balances that cannot be outsourced. Even if they have outsourced it, the accountability remains 100% with the CIO, since outsourcing is only a means of achieving efficiency and not abdicating responsibility. Imagine if a bank gives a million dollars to be transported in cash; the security agency to whom it outsourced, loses that money; the bank comes back and tells the depositor that they lost the money because transporting it was someone else’s responsibility and say “We are in touch with ABC Security Agency and they are working on a resolution.”
Banking IT wing should hire young talents and groom them for their tech requirements, they too get frustrated and become dumb guys over a period of time as they will be headed by some bankers outside the IT domain. It’s the reality across the PSU banks. And it’s not sufficient to just hold the CIO responsible it’s much more complex and staffing decisions and strategy goes up to the Board level, so the CIO cannot be the scapegoat. Who knows, the Board might have actually sanctioned naming and shaming of the vendor to shield themselves.

With the SBI tech issues, leading private banks being asked to pause new digital initiatives, and the failures on UPI, the question that begs to ask is that has Indian banking tech got too far ahead of itself?