Facing flak for outages, HDFC Bank to hire 500 in 'digital and enterprise factory'

It can be noted that the bank, which had 1.2 lakh people on its rolls as of March, has been facing flak for repeated tech outages in the last couple of years and has also been barred by the Reserve Bank from selling any new credit cards or launching new digital products. 

In a statement, the bank said it is setting up a 'digital factory and an enterprise factory' to roll out new digital products and services in the future and augment its IT infrastructure. 

The 'factories' are part of its technology transformation agenda to run and transform the bank, it added. 

A total of 500 people will be hired over the next two years, from diverse backgrounds such as data analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, design thinking, cloud and DevOps, the bank noted. 

The 'digital factory' is aimed at ensuring reliability, availability, scalability and security, while the 'enterprise factory' will upgrade legacy infrastructure, decouple existing systems and build its own capabilities, the statement said. 

The bank had last week said that it continues to stay in touch with the RBI for restarting the banned services, but giving a timeline for it will be difficult. 

Its chief information officer Ramesh Lakshminarayanan said there have been a series of actions, including the visit of an external audit team to assess its capabilities and also submission of the audit report. 

"We are awaiting further directions from the regulator in this matter. We are fully prepared, we have shared all of the required information. We are awaiting further guidance from the regulator in terms of seeing how this will pan out now. I don't have the timelines now, I can't second guess. 

''We are also working very closely with the regulator and the industry in terms of ensuring that some of the outages we saw, we continue to address them in a fruitful way,'' he said.