Bank of Baroda (BoB) on Wednesday said that the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has lifted the restriction imposed on it in October last year, which banned the lender from onboarding customers onto the ‘bob World’.
The bank is free to onboard customers through bob World, the lender’s mobile banking application, in accordance with the applicable guidelines and extant laws/regulations, BoB said in a filing to exchanges.
The lender said it will now resume onboarding new customers in the bob World application.
In October, the RBI, directed BoB to suspend any further onboarding of their customers onto the ‘bob World’ mobile application, with immediate effect, based on certain material supervisory concerns observed in the manner of onboarding of their customers onto this mobile application.
In July last year, a media report said that some of the bank’s employees were involved in fake onboarding of customers onto bob World. The report said that a few employees of the bank’s Bhopal zonal office linked some bank accounts to mobile numbers of different people and registered them on the mobile app. This was aimed at increasing the registration number of bob World.
The lender launched its mobile banking app in September 2021.
As of the September 2023 quarter (before the RBI ban), the daily transactions, both financials and non-financials, on bob World were 7.95 million, which reduced to 7.19 million as of December 2023.
Last month, the RBI directed Kotak Mahindra Bank to stop onboarding of new customers through its online and mobile banking channels and also barred it from issuing fresh credit cards with immediate effect, citing “serious deficiencies” and “non-compliance” by the private bank in its IT (information technology) risk management and information security governance for 2022 and 2023.