KUALA LUMPUR: The Federation of Malaysian Consumers Associations (Fomca) wants Bank Negara Malaysia to enforce heavier penalties against banking institutions to keep them on their toes following recent incidences of service outages.

Its chief executive officer, T. Saravanan, said the outages by two of the country's largest banking institutions had inconvenienced hundreds of thousands of consumers.

"With the current cashless society initiatives, many rely on technology to conduct daily transactions. With the festive season, many who rushed for last-minute Aidilfitri shopping, ended up being frustrated with the downtime.

"Many businesses which tried to pay salaries and allowances were forced to find other measures to conduct their banking transactions.

"This all falls under the security of the banking industry which needs to stay on par with the current technology system," he told the New Straits Times.

Saravanan said the outages were unacceptable given the 5th Industrial Revolution and 5G penetration.

Yesterday, CIMB Malaysia took to social media to announce that it was experiencing intermittent service disruptions on CIMB Clicks, CIMB OCTO, FPX, MyDebit, credit and self service terminals.

On April 5, Malayan Banking Bhd saw disruptions affecting its debit cards, online banking and automated-teller machine service.

BNM, in a statement, said it took a serious view of the recent banking services outages and ordered the two banks to explain the root cause leading to the incidents, as well as corrective and preventive measures undertaken to avoid a recurrence of similar issues.

Saravanan commended BNM on taking measures to investigate the issue.

"We need to see more of this, as self regulation does not seem to work. We need stronger BNM presence in terms of regulating banking and insurance industry."