Bank lendings crippled for a week!

It is preposterous that every bank in the country has been forced to stop credit operations because of a technical glitch in the Credit Information Bureau (CIB) server of Bangladesh Bank (BB) that was out of service for a week up to March 13! Given that no bank in the country is allowed to give out any loan if the CIB report is not generated, we would have thought that the BB management would have placed more priority on the IT server and those who operate the IT system.

Equally unacceptable is the fact that when the operation was finally restored on March 13 after a week, it broke down again, which means the banks are also offline, again. And this frequent breakdown has been attributed to the failure of requisite cooling of the server room.

How exactly is it that the banking sector has been offline with its credit operations for a week that has invariably affected millions of its clients? Why did it take a week for BB to restore the cooling system of the data centre? More importantly, why weren't client banks informed of the failure as soon as it happened? There appear to be multiple failures in management practices, which need to be addressed immediately so that there is no repeat of this experience in the future. And should there not be backup arrangements so that the banks' operations are not entirely disrupted, and that the essential transactions continue without let.