Karachi January 11 2023: State Bank of Pakistan issued directives for any disruption in digital services in order to ensure that customers are informed about service disruptions due to any scheduled or unforeseen activity.
Customers and SBP must be informed about any planned activity which may result in the service disruption, in the following manner:
Customers shall be informed at least two days in advance through various communication channels including but not limited to SMS alerts, social media platforms, in-app notifications etc and SBP shall be notified at least one week in advance.
In any situation where downtime exceeds by more than two hours of its planned duration, then it should be immediately conveyed to the customers and reported to SBP.
In case of unanticipated service disruption for more than thirty minutes, due to any reason, customers must be immediately informed about any disruption of services through the aforementioned communication channels, together with an estimated time of restoration of services and SBP shall be notified.
Customers and SBP shall also be informed once services have resumed as usual.
All Regulated Entities (RE) must establish mechanisms to continuously monitor social media platforms in order to proactively identify and address customer complaints or issues relating to the availability of digital channels.
SBP, as part of its oversight responsibility, will also be regularly monitoring the availability of digital channels.
Cumulative downtimes on a monthly basis shall be reported to SBP. In case the unanticipated downtime exceeds more than three hours per quarter, SBP shall be informed about the steps taken by respective RE to avoid disruption in future.
