New Delhi: The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has ordered Bank of Baroda (BoB) to suspend further customer onboarding on its ‘bob World’ mobile app with immediate effect, citing material supervisory concerns.“The RBI has, in exercise of its power, under section 35A of the Banking Regulation Act, 1949, directed Bank of Baroda to suspend, with immediate effect, any further onboarding of their customers onto the ‘bob World’ mobile application,” RBI said in a release.It said the action on the bank is based on certain material supervisory concerns observed in the manner of onboarding of their customers onto this mobile application.According to news reports, under section 35A, the RBI has power to give directions to banks ‘to prevent the affairs of any banking company being conducted in a manner detrimental to the interests of the depositors or in a manner prejudicial to the interests of the banking company’.The RBI order comes months after allegations were made against the bank’s officials for using phone numbers of strangers to inflate registrations for its mobile banking app BoB World.In March 2022, Al Jazeera reported allegations against BoB officials in the Bhopal zone. They were given a target of onboarding at least 150 existing bank customers for the bank’s new app, “bob World,” which had been launched six months earlier. The officials faced challenges in getting people to sign up, and their regional office monitored and reprimanded them for poor performance.According to the report, an anonymous official and his colleagues obtained a list of bank accounts not linked to mobile numbers. They linked these accounts to various mobile numbers, including those of bank staffers, sanitation and security workers, and their relatives, to generate the one-time password required for app registration. After signing up these accounts from the backend, the employees would then deregister the customers from the app and reuse the same mobile numbers for other bank accounts.Al Jazeera alleged that BoB employees in Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Jharkhand also employed this practice to meet their targets.A retired executive from Gujarat highlighted these irregularities by sending five emails to the bank’s top management. He shared these emails with Al Jazeera on the condition of anonymity.BoB had denied these allegations.
