BANK Negara Malaysia (BNM) has imposed administrative monetary penalties (AMP) on CIMB Bank and Maybank for e-banking service outages that occurred in June and April, respectively.
In separate statements, the central bank reported that Maybank paid the full penalty for the AMP imposed on 8 August, while CIMB settled its penalty on 12 August 2024.
On 29 July 2024, BNM fined CIMB RM760,000 following service disruptions on 8 and 9 April 2024. Maybank was fined RM4.32 million for repeated service outages between June 2023 and May 2024.
These outages impacted Maybank's mobile banking platform and MAE app, causing unplanned downtime and prolonged disruptions in several banking services that interface with customers and counterparties.
To prevent future issues, Maybank has begun improving its infrastructure, taking necessary actions to close these gaps as part of its multi-year investments to enhance application and infrastructure resilience.
BNM also said that CIMB’s customers faced prolonged service disruptions from 8 to 9 April 2024, affecting e-banking channels, ATMs, and debit and credit card services. These disruptions exceeded the thresholds set by BNM.
CIMB acknowledged the central bank’s decision and expressed regret over the unplanned downtime, which impacted its customers and counterparties during those dates.
According to BNM, financial institutions must ensure that their critical systems are designed for high availability. Specifically, cumulative unplanned downtime that affects the user interface must not exceed four hours on a rolling 12-month basis, with a maximum tolerable downtime of 120 minutes per incident.
BNM stated that Maybank has since taken the necessary actions to address the gaps as part of its multi-year infrastructure investments to prevent future non-compliance. – August 14, 2024.
