SINGAPORE — A long-awaited date with her national serviceman boyfriend for Ms Nazrana Shaheen ended up being cut short, no thanks to a banking services disruption by DBS Bank and Citibank on Oct 14.
SINGAPORE — A long-awaited date with her national serviceman boyfriend for Ms Nazrana Shaheen ended up being cut short, no thanks to a
Experts said while more can be done to prevent outages, there are no foolproof methods to ensure they won't happenSINGAPORE — A long-awaited date with her national serviceman boyfriend for Ms Nazrana Shaheen ended up being cut short, no thanks to a “The recent service disruption has definitely changed my opinion on the reliability of e-payments, especially DBS because this is not the first time I've encountered such a disruption from the company,” she added.
Both Ms Nazrana and Ms Nadya posted TikTok videos on Oct 14 about their experience of the banking outage, which have since garnered over 44,000 and 220,000 views respectively. The disruption saw banking services by DBS Bank and Citibank being down from the afternoon of Oct 14 — a Saturday — due to an issue at the data centre used by both banks.
Screenshots showing the DBS digital banking service page and PayLah! service being down on Oct 14, 2023. The D-SIBs are DBS Bank, OCBC, United Overseas Bank, Standard Chartered Bank, Citibank, The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation and Malayan Banking Berhad. However, they also caution that offline payment applications come with their own set of challenges for both businesses and consumers.
“We had a beeline of customers whose DBS and Citibank-issued cards didn’t work. We restarted our devices, checked the connection, and nothing worked. Then we saw the notification from the news and realised there was an outage.”“No one on the island knew that there was a DBS outage as they do not have connection on certain parts of the island, specifically in my store, and our store's wireless connection is unstable.
“We requested them to leave us a direct message on Instagram, including a photo of their items and the total price. Our part-timer also recorded down all the Instagram handles who owed us the payment as it would be easier for us to keep track and tally the sales,” she said. “Once customers realised the payments weren’t working they swapped to another card that worked, so we’re lucky that there were other banks or credit card providers that weren’t affected.”Hello Arigato has four outlets across Singapore that accept only cashless modes of payments. Mr Colin Chen, founder of the cafe, said that its business was largely unaffected during the banking services disruption as customers used cards from other banks or opted to pay via GrabPay, an e-wallet.
Mr Keith Tan, founder and chief executive officer of Crown Digital, a startup that runs Ella, said that their services were unaffected as the payment terminal they use was not from one of the affected banks. Users can also order and pay via their mobile app, which can be linked to a user’s credit cards.
While a previous outage this year where mobile app payments for Ella were halted by an internal development error was “painful”, Mr Tan said that these disruptions do not deter him from keeping the business cashless. Ms Lim said that the latest disruption demonstrated a “vulnerability that Singapore and our banks need to review and address”.
Any issue with a data centre key component, including servers and hardware, cooling, and power supplies, could lead to the outage for their customers.said on Oct 19 that both DBS Bank and Citibank were unable to fully recover their systems within the required timeframe. Under MAS’ requirements, the unscheduled downtime for a critical system affecting a bank’s operations or service to customers must not exceed four hours within any 12-month period.
To ensure business continuity in the immediate period of a service disruption, fail-safe measures are needed, they added. Mr Chen from Hello Arigato said that his staff had been trained to accept cash payment in case none of the e-payment alternatives work. For Mr Rodney Sim, group commercial manager at gastrobar GudSht, e-payment is the “primary payment option” at his business, which accepts a range of e-payment methods including QR Code payment, all major credit cards, Nets and buy-now-pay-later options from Pace.
Consumers, too, should not be totally reliant on just a single mode of payment. They should instead have some cash on them always, and expand their repertoire of digital payment options, the experts said. The Accenture Payments Survey 2022 found that 76 per cent of respondents in the Asia-Pacific used digital wallets for payment transactions at least five times a month, compared to the 63 per cent opting for cash.
“This allows us to offer personalised and exceptional customer service, such as recognising and rewarding a regular customer a free dish as the e-payment terminal displays the customer has been to the cafe for over 10 times,” said Ms Lim. This was echoed by Mr Koven, who said that one key reason businesses prefer to remain cashless is shifting consumer expectations, which now tend towards “frictionless payment experiences” and “smooth and secure transactions”.
“Businesses benefit from increased brand trust, a competitive edge, and broader consumer reach,” he said. For consumers, the ubiquity of local banking infrastructure with widely available ATMs and bank branches across Singapore, coupled with a “long-standing loyalty to cash” among older Singaporeans, make a shift to digital payments a “long-haul effort rather than a quick change”, Dr Lee said.
“Resilience comes in many forms — ease of payments and frictionless transactions are one part of it, but if you want to protect older folk from things like scams, you may actually need to re-introduce some friction into the system, to ensure safeguards are in place.”
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