The “Bank Bachao Desh Bachao Manch” has demanded the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to conduct in depth investigation in all Banks having mobile banking apps in the backdrop of the banking regulator taking action against Bank of Baroda (BoB) due to certain material supervisory concerns in the manner of onboarding their customers onto its mobile application.
The forum’s Joint Convenors’ Soumya Datta and Biswaranjan Ray stated that due to unrealistic targets assigned to the employees at the’ branch level on any banking channel activity — selling of third party products, opening of current accounts, onboarding customers for mobile banking app, etc., often leading to irregular and unlawful acts being perpetrated by them. Further, the authorities turn a blind eye to such activities as long as the targets are achieved.
To achieve the targets, branch staff resort to malpractices to satisfy the authorities, they alleged.
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“It is indeed a matter of consternation that the Banks are breaching the basic fiduciary responsibility (to protect the interest of the common depositors who repose their utmost faith in the security and safety of the banking system) that they are supposed to uphold all the time,” the Joint Conveners said in a letter to the Governor.
The Forum wants RBI to direct all Banks to investigate the operations of business correspondents to detect malpractices, if any, like substitution of bio-metric details of customers at the time of opening of accounts, and monitoring of customer service kiosks.