RONALD LEE: Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin has resigned a week after a nationwide service outage left some 10 million Australians without phone or internet access for 12 hours.
Something, something… hara kiri… as former minister Khaw Boon Wan said.
Now, closer to home, how about DBS and its CEO Piyush Gupta?
DBS customers faced a 2-day service disruption in Oct this year.
At the heart of the problem was a malfunction in the cooling system of the data centre which hosts the bank’s IT systems.
Singaporeans have questioned if DBS has been grossly negligent – how could the leading bank in Singapore not have an adequate and working backup plan?
DBS service outages have become pretty commonplace in 2023.
In March, there was a 10-hour service disruption where customers had to go the day without online banking access.
In May, another disruption saw ATMs and online banking services go down.
And 2023 isn’t even over yet.
Just 2 years ago, CEO Gupta said DBS is “increasingly thinking of ourselves as a technology company offering financial services, rather than a traditional bank,” adding that the DBS has “twice as more engineers than bankers”.
What has happened between then and now?
Maybe its time for CEO Gupta to honourably resign so that DBS can start performing more like a bank again and fulfill its core duty to customers.
