Posted by Mumbai: SBI’s YONO mobile app has been down for two days due to system outage. However, the State Bank of India (SBI) is still working to fix the technical glitches in its system so the functioning of YONO (You Only Need One) mobile app can be restored.
The outage of SBI’s YONO mobile app has occurred just a day after RBI ordered HDFC Bank to temporarily hault its upcoming digital business-generating activities and new IT plans due to the outage of service.
For India’s largest public sector bank with 490 million customers, daily conducting an upward of 4 lakh transactions and an estimated 55% of those transactions are executed via the digital channel.
The bank can’t afford its IT systems, infrastructure and apps to develop any technical snag or malfunctions that affect the banking services for a huge base of customers and their needs.
SBI’s YONO mobile app has approximate 50% share in the bank’s digital channel-based transactions, which certainly show how crucial role the YONO app is playing for the customers and the bank. The YONO mobile app has around 27.6 million users.
SBI Outage Under RBI Radar
The Reserve Bank of India as a central banking and regulatory authority on Friday said it is reviewing the SBI outage incident that pulled down the bank’s YONO mobile app for the past two days.
“The central bank is reviewing the recent SBI outage,” said RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das.
“There is a need for banks and financial institutions to invest more in their IT system. We are constantly engaged with the management of financial institutions where there is a need to improve their IT systems,” added Governor Das.
SBI’s Communication On The Outage
“YONO SBI Mobile application has been impacted due to a system outage. Steps are being taken to the restoration of uninterrupted service. We regret the inconvenience caused and request customers to use OnlineSBI and YONO Lite for their banking needs,” SBI announced on social media.
“We request our esteemed customers to bear with us as we work towards restoring YONO SBI app to provide for an uninterrupted banking experience,” SBI tweeted on November 3 at 12.55 PM.
SBI’s YONO Mobile App Outage Continues
However, it’s been close to two days, since the YONO mobile app has malfunctioned because of some technical snags in the bank’s system. And this has caused a major disruption of SBI’s mobile banking services, triggering an unprecedented inconvenience and irk to bank’s huge customer base.
SBI Customers Express Their YONO App Experiences
Many of SBI’s YONO mobile app users have shared the kind of technical issues they were facing. Some users said that they were facing mobile app login issues with error code ‘Moo5’ and others pointed out that the mobile app was not moving or responding beyond the home page.
Even SBI’s mobile banking portal has been under maintenance and was slated to be live and functional from 2 PM on November 4, an SBI customer posted in a tweet.
YONO Mobile App Updated
SBI lasted updated its YONO mobile app on November 20. The app‘s current version is 1.23.26 and so far it has over 50,000,000 installations on mobile devices. India’s largest public-sector launched YONO mobile app in November 2017.
This is not the first time that SBI has suffered an outage of service issue whether its the banking services on the internet via a website or mobile banking via an app. SBI customers have regularly shared and expressed their issues concerning the bank’s digital services.
Big Question On The $40 Billion Valuation of SBI’s YONO App
The on-going outage of SBI’s YONO app and the bank’s inability fix the technical issue even after two days actually has raised a big question on SBI Chairman Rajnish Kumar. A few months ago, Kumar made a big statement on the app’s valuation in the media.
“SBI Yono could have been valued between $40-$50 billion if it were a startup,” Kumar had said, where he was trying to project the YONO app as startup having a super app product that offers everything to the users.
Probably, SBI Chairman would be certainly be regretting his statement on the high valuation of YONO app because his bank failed to restore the app and couldn’t help its users even after two days.
Better, the SBI Chief should focus on investing in technology to avoid malfunction and outage of bank’s IT systems and apps rather giving statement in the media.
Proactive Measures To Deal With The Outage
Certainly, the Indian banking industry needs to take proactive measure to address the outage of service issues particularly when the banking industry is pushing for digital services using the internet, mobile apps and social media platforms.
Technical glitches can’t be ruled out, but it is the responsibility and accountability for service providers to fix them in a time-bound and effective manner.
Today, most banks in India are guilty of compelling to their customers to use banking services in a certain way like internet banking or mobile banking app.
And these banks also fail to provide alternate channels for banking services, which are very necessary for scenarios like outage of services due to system failure, maintenance of servers, power failure or technical glitches due to software update.
Most of these issue does take a long time to find and fix affecting services in a big way causing inconvenience to customers. Given this current situation where SBI customers have not been to use mobile banking services over the past two days.
So will the RBI take some action against SBI and issue any notice about service outage as it did with HDFC Bank? That’s a key question from the Indian banking industry and regulatory point.