Downtime leaves ICICI Bank customers high and dry

Many customers who tried to access banking applications over ICICI Bank's core banking system were wondering since May 12, whether the application will or will not accept a transaction. The log-in and transactions were taking longer time than expected.

While informal assurances from the bank maintain that no major glitches came up in the normal functioning, there are some wrinkles that keep us curious as to how well did the bank navigate the upgrade time window.

The bank had informed its customers about possible service disruptions over May 9 and 11 for its core banking system upgrade. It was revealed in some media reports following the upgrade that some bugs were discovered in the network thus extending the restoration and perhaps causing more delay than expected.

The public relations agency of the bank denies any downtime, but if the software upgrade entails new features and streamlining of the system further, this raises questions on the ‘how long’ and ‘how uneventful’ part of the upgrade.

What pops out hugely here is the timing of the upgrade chosen and the capacity planning for such a scenario. Turns out that the website was running slower than normal at some points and the call-centre bandwidth of the bank was also reasonably affected.

Why the transactions are still affected, post the upgrade also, stays unanswered- especially when it impacts critical functions like Internet banking.

Queries to Infosys, whose Finacle runs the CBS at ICICI Bank and to the bank have elicited no response so far.

But as a veteran CIO from another major bank helps us get a grip on a situation of this nature, such migrations are generally planned for 48 to 60 hours i.e. Friday night cutover to Monday morning release. “All migrations generally get completed in the time so that there is no customer impact beyond the stipulated time. These events are well rehearsed, tested and timed so that there is no chance of error. If any of these steps are missed or not done diligently, issues emerge,” explains he.

What may be notable here is that data loss and downtime cost enterprises over $54 billion as per a recent EMC study. 53 per cent of IT professionals were not found fully confident in their ability to recover information following an incident. When in 2014, EMC Corporation unveiled the findings of a global data protection study on data loss and downtime it showed that the starkest thing to spot was that as many as 70 per cent of India organizations were not fully confident in their ability to recover after a disruption.

It also pointed that the average business experienced more than 2.5 working days (23 hours) of unexpected downtime in the last 12 months but other commercial consequences of disruptions were loss of employee productivity (58 per cent), and loss of revenue (50 per cent).

Based on a research survey conducted during October and November of 2014 itself, it was observed that for the Fortune 1000, the average total cost of unplanned application downtime per year is $1.25 billion to $2.5 billion, wherein the average hourly cost of an infrastructure failure is $100,000 per hour and average cost of a critical application failure per hour is $500,000 to $1 million.

Juxtapose this to how another bank issued a caveat for an imminent downtime at one of its global branch very recently. It also cautioned its customers that there will be limited access to telephone banking, online transactions and limited services will be available to customers and delays in statements and notifications could also happen.

“We understand the frustration and impact to customers that disruptions to services have and apologise in advance for the inconvenience,” its spokesperson had even added in a pre-emptive stroke.

It is worth appreciating that ICICI Bank too left no stone unturned (SMS updates etc.) to prepare customers for the upcoming upgrade. But why is the system still not restored fully even after the specified time period, which could have considerable effect on its business clientele; and was it ready for any unexpected surprises?

If the bank can help us answer those questions, it will make its customers more happy and eager for the ‘better banking experience’ that the bank had promised.