Over 140 million customers to face disruptions as HDFC, Axis Bank upgrade systems

MUMBAI: More than 140 million customers of HDFC Bank and Axis Bank will face service interruptions on Saturday as the former is upgrading its systems and the latter is completing the transition of Citi India business. Both the banks have been notifying their customers about the interruption in services since last week.

HDFC Bank, the largest private sector lender with over 93.2 million customers, has said it will be undertaking a system upgrade on July 13 to migrate its core banking system to a new engineered platform to offer enhanced customer experience.

During the 13.5-hour upgrade beginning from Friday midnight, HDFC Bank customers will only be able to use their debit cards and credit cards on swipe machines and for online transactions, that too for a restricted amount. They can also withdraw a restricted amount of cash from any ATM using their debit cards.

The ubiquitous UPI services will be the worst affected and will not be available for customers from 3 am to 3.45 am and from 9.30 am to 12.45 pm on Saturday.

For merchants, while they can continue to receive payments via cards, updates to the account for the previous day’s payments will be available only after the upgrade, the HDFC Bank said.

On the other hand, Axis Bank, which is the third largest private sector lender with around 48 million customers, has said certain services on its platform will be unavailable from 1000 hrs. on Friday 12 through 0900 hrs. on Sunday.

The affected services include Internet banking and mobile banking apps, fund transfer accounts through NEFT, RTGS and IMPS, credit card transactions, mutual fund subscriptions, and loan services throughout Saturday and Sunday. The bank has also informed its customers about these outages well in advance.

The bank completed the 11,600-crore acquisition of Citi India’s consumer business and non-banking financial company (NBFC) consumer business on March 1, 2023, and has then said the integration would be completed in 18 months. The deal was announced in March 2023. The sale excludes Citi’s institutional client businesses here.

Axis Bank is the fourth-largest issuer of credit cards with a total base close to 9 million cards and the Citi deal would have added about 2.5 million credit cards.

In April 2021, American banking major Citigroup announced its plan to exit the consumer banking business in India as part of its global strategy. The business comprised credit cards, retail banking, home loans and wealth management. The bank has 35 branches in the country and employs about 4,000 people in the consumer banking business.

Citigroup entered India in 1902 and started the consumer banking business in 1985.