Singapore's DBS Says Mobile Wallet Services Back to Normal

(Bloomberg) -- DBS Group Holdings Ltd. said PayLah! services were back to normal after access to the mobile wallet was intermittent on Friday morning.

"We would like to update customers that as of 11.40am, PayLah! services have returned to normal," DBS said in a Facebook post on Friday (October 20).  

The incident comes days after the bank experienced an outage on October 14 that lasted hours due to a data center failure. Customers of DBS and a local unit of Citigroup Inc had said they were unable to use credit cards or complete other online transactions. 

The disruption on October 14 could weaken DBS's performance related to the environment, social, and governance aspects, said Bloomberg Intelligence Sarah Jane Mahmud. "The bank should have strengthened systems after a probe into three prior outages resulted in S$1.6 billion of extra-regulatory capital charges," she said.

DBS shares were down as much as 0.9% versus a 0.6% decline in the Bloomberg Asia Pacific Banks Index.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore has instructed DBS and Citi Singapore to investigate the causes of the disruption and said it will "take appropriate supervisory actions after gathering the necessary facts."

Local banks are required to maintain and test backup facilities so that "critical systems and services" can be restored within four hours following an outage, the regulator said Thursday.