SINGAPORE – The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) is working with DBS Bank to pinpoint the root cause of a disruption to the bank’s PayNow and Fast And Secure Transfers (Fast) services last week.

In response to media queries, an MAS spokesman said on Monday that DBS had on Sept 26 informed the regulator that a disruption had affected “numerous” customers.

Fast is an electronic inter-bank fund transfer service.

While services were restored within the day, reconciliation of transactions and remediation for affected DBS/POSB accounts were completed only three days later, the spokesman said.

Reconciliation is a process that ensures unauthorised charges have not occurred to transactions during processing.

“MAS expects banks to have the ability to recover quickly from any system disruption, and to address and resolve the impact to customers swiftly and transparently,” the spokesman added.

The authority said it would be following up with DBS on the root cause of the incident, as well as its handling of the affected customers and transactions.

On Sept 26, several DBS customers experienced delays, among other issues, while using the bank’s PayNow service.

According to Downdetector, which tracks disruptions and issues involving various service providers, there were 163 complaints at 3.53pm that day.

One customer told The Straits Times that his account had double the amount deducted from it after he tried to make a transfer.

The recent interruption to services comes after two major disruptions to DBS’ services.

The bank experienced a 6½-hour disruption to its services on May 5, caused by human error, and a 12-hour disruption in March, caused by inherent software bugs.