MAS Proposes Notices on Management of Services Outsourced by Banks

Services that are covered as outsourced relevant services include public cloud services such as software-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, and infrastructure-as-a-service. Other services in this category are information technology helpdesks services, data center operations or data center facility management services, express letter and parcel delivery services, and card embossing services. MAS also proposed that relevant services that are not for the conduct of banking business and where the service provider does not have access to a bank or merchant bank's confidential or customer information be considered as exempted outsourced relevant services, and not be subject to the proposed Notices given the nature of such services. To help the industry determine which relevant services are outsourced relevant services, MAS is proposing to set out:

• A non-exhaustive list of relevant services that are commonly performed by banks or merchant banks (Annex A of the proposed notices)
• An exhaustive list of relevant services that are not commonly performed by banks or merchant banks and thus, are excluded from the definition of outsourced relevant service (Annex B of the proposed notices)
• An exhaustive list of relevant services, that are not commonly performed by banks or merchant banks, but are considered by MAS as outsourced relevant services and thus, are subject to relevant requirements in the proposed notices (Annex C of the proposed notices)

Comment Due Date: January 29, 2021

Keywords: Asia Pacific, Singapore, Banking, Merchant Banks, Outsourcing, Cloud Computing, SAAS, MAS