Ensuring Digital Banking Uptime: A New Era of Transparency and Resilience

The digital transformation of India’s banking sector has been nothing short of revolutionary. Fueled by the widespread adoption of smartphones and affordable internet access, digital payment methods like Unified Payments Interface (UPI), Immediate Payment Service (IMPS), and National Electronic Funds Transfer (NEFT) have become indispensable to daily life. Mobile banking apps now offer a comprehensive suite of financial services at our fingertips. This rapid evolution has brought unparalleled convenience and efficiency but also underscored the critical importance of transparency and operational resilience in this increasingly digital landscape.

Customers today expect seamless, 24/7 access to financial services, making service uptime a non-negotiable requirement. Imagine a customer standing at a grocery store checkout, their cart full, only to face a declined transaction because of a temporary outage in their bank’s UPI services. The frustration isn’t just theirs—behind the scenes, banks scramble to identify and resolve the issue, which could stem from a network glitch, middleware failure, or downtime in a third-party API. Such scenarios, while inconvenient for customers, also expose the complexities of maintaining uptime in a digital-first banking ecosystem.

These challenges aren’t unique to India. Globally, banks have faced significant disruptions that impact their operations and reputations. Earlier this year, Canadian bank Laurentian replaced its chief executive following a major IT outage caused during planned maintenance. This outage highlighted how even routine updates can lead to significant service interruptions if operational resilience isn’t prioritized.

Recognizing these challenges, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has taken proactive steps to address the issue. Among its initiatives is the introduction of the SEWA (Service Availability Web Page) portal, a dashboard that encourages banks to publicly display real-time information on the availability of their services. This initiative is not just about improving transparency but also about empowering customers to make informed decisions and driving banks to prioritize uptime and reliability in their digital services.

As India’s banking sector embraces this new era of transparency, the focus must remain on building robust systems that minimize disruptions and enhance the customer experience. The path forward lies in leveraging cutting-edge technologies and observability platforms to ensure operational resilience and uninterrupted service delivery.

The Challenge of Digital Downtime

Despite the progress, digital banking systems are not immune to disruptions. Banks frequently experience downtimes due to a range of factors:

• Unplanned Disruptions:
  Unexpected issues such as hardware failures, software glitches, network problems, application transaction failures and cyberattacks can lead to unplanned downtime. In today’s digital-first world, where every transaction involves a complex web of interconnected systems, the risk is amplified. Transactions typically navigate through multiple APIs, touchpoints, and layers—including cloud providers, load balancers, middleware components, third-party services, vendor-driven solutions, and core banking systems—creating challenges of scale, complexity, and interdependencies.
• Planned Maintenance:
  Routine system updates and maintenance activities, while necessary, can cause temporary service outages.

These downtimes have significant impacts:

• Erosion of Customer Trust:
  When services are unavailable, it erodes customer trust and confidence in the reliability of digital banking platforms.
• Customer Frustration:
  The inability to conduct transactions or access account information leads to frustration and inconvenience.
• Communication Gap:
  Banks often delay informing customers about service outages, leaving them uncertain about the situation.
• Damage of Reputation:
  Downtimes often trigger social media complaints, which can quickly escalate and damage a bank’s reputation.

In the recent session on the launch of the SEWA portal, Shri A. G. Giridharan – General Manager (Department of Supervision), Reserve Bank of India – highlighted that

“in the past year (April 2023 to March 2024), Indian banks reported approximately 200 instances of planned downtime for Core Banking Systems (CBS) and around 300 instances of planned downtime for Mobile Banking. In addition, unplanned downtimes accounted for about 50 instances for CBS and between 130-150 for Mobile Banking. While a significant portion (around 77%) of these downtimes lasted less than two hours, a notable 18-20% fell into the two-to-four-hour bucket, indicating that disruptions can sometimes be prolonged.”

For customers, it’s the service disruption that matters, regardless of whether the downtime is planned or unplanned.

Introducing the SEWA Portal

To address the challenges of such operational disruptions, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), in collaboration with the Indian Banks Association (IBA), has launched the SEWA portal. This initiative represents a significant leap toward enhancing transparency and reliability in the digital banking sector. The SEWA portal is designed to publicly display the real-time and future availability of critical banking services, including internet banking, RTGS, NEFT, IMPS, UPI, and mobile banking.

The primary objectives of the SEWA portal are:

• Transparency: Providing customers with clear, real-time information about the availability of banking services.
• Customer Empowerment: Enabling customers to make informed decisions about when and how to conduct transactions.
• Positive Competition: Encouraging banks to maintain high availability and improve operational resilience.

The global financial services industry is increasingly adopting stricter standards for operational transparency and uptime. Regulators in Singapore have imposed stringent limits on critical application downtimes, restricting them to just 4 hours annually. Similarly, the US and EU have introduced detailed reporting requirements for third-party providers and cloud security, emphasizing accountability across the ecosystem. In India, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) might shift towards similar trends, focusing on operational resilience and signaling a shift toward stricter compliance standards across the financial sector.

How VuNet Can Help Banks Drive Observability and Compliance

At VuNet, we deeply understand the complexities of the banking sector and the critical need for operational resilience. Through VuNet’s domain centric adapters, our expertise extends beyond tracking basic downtime metrics to monitoring essential indicators like transaction failure rates, technical declines (TD%), and volume dips (BD%) with historical context. This nuanced approach ensures a comprehensive view of banking operations.

With pre-built adapters, VuNet seamlessly integrates with existing banking systems and tools, enabling rapid deployment and efficient monitoring. Whether connecting to a bank’s internal service portal or RBI’s SEWA Portal, our platform simplifies the integration process, automates alerting for critical events, and ensures compliance with regulatory requirements.
We have partnered with numerous leading banks, providing end-to-end observability for services like UPI, IMPS, RTGS, and NEFT. This collaboration has given us valuable insights into best practices for monitoring, alerting, and reporting, which we actively share to help banks enhance their systems.

VuNet’s solutions are designed to ensure operational transparency, reduce complexity, and deliver actionable insights, empowering banks to provide seamless and reliable digital experiences for their customers while meeting compliance standards effortlessly.

By partnering with VuNet, banks can significantly enhance their monitoring capabilities, leading to more reliable and consistent digital services.

Call To Action

The SEWA portal represents a crucial step towards a more transparent and resilient digital banking ecosystem. We encourage all banks to embrace this initiative and leverage the SEWA portal to enhance their digital service availability. Furthermore, we invite banks to explore how VuNet can help them achieve unparalleled levels of system reliability and uptime. By working together, we can build a future where digital banking is not just convenient but also dependable, reliable, and trustworthy.