On Monday, Singapore’s OCBC, the fourth-largest bank in Southeast Asia, experienced a short-lived outage that affected its digital and card banking services. The bank initially reported technical issues impacting its banking channels and later announced the restoration of card, branch, and ATM services. OCBC shares saw a 1.05% increase in afternoon trading following the incident.

In response to the disruption, OCBC assured its customers that no security breach had occurred and that their funds and data remained safe. The bank’s spokesperson stated that investigations are ongoing to identify the cause of the technical problem. This incident echoes recent service disruptions experienced by Singapore’s largest bank, DBS, which faced two disruptions in February and March. Consequently, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) imposed an additional capital requirement on DBS due to the outages.

MAS criticized DBS for falling short of expectations and deemed the service disruptions unacceptable. As a result, DBS was mandated to apply a multiplier of 1.8 times to its risk-weighted assets for operational risk, requiring additional regulatory capital of around 1.6 billion Singapore dollars (approximately $1.2 billion).

The OCBC outage highlights the vulnerability of banking institutions to technical disruptions, underscoring the need for robust operational resilience and technology systems. The incident also draws attention to the regulatory oversight exercised by MAS to ensure the stability and reliability of the financial sector in Singapore.

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