Bank Of Baroda's BoB World Out Of Woods; RBI Lifts Restriction Of Onboarding New Customers After 9 Months

One of the nightmares in 2023 that leading PSU lender Bank of Baroda faced was RBI's ban on its popular BoB World application which had halted onboarding of new customers and services. The scam around BoB World escalated like a wildfire, shocking banking and financial systems with even periodic shocks of selloffs on exchanges. After 9 months, Bank of Baroda's BoB World is out of the woods.

In its regulatory filing, Bank of Baroda said, "We wish to inform that the RBI, vide its letter dated 8th May 2024, conveyed to the Bank its decision to lift the above mentioned restrictions on Bob World with immediate effect, as such the bank is free to onboard customers through Bob World application in accordance with the applicable guidelines and extant laws/regulations."

Further, Bank Of Baroda added that the bank will now resume onboarding new customers in the Bob World application. The Bank remains committed to ensure adherence and compliance of regulatory guidelines.

Bank of Baroda's share price will be in focus on Thursday. On May 8th, the stock ended at Rs 262.70 apiece, up by 1.4% on BSE with a market cap of Rs 1,35,851.68 crore.

It was on October 10, 2023, RBI had banned Bank of Baroda from onboarding new customers on its BoB World app. But the problem in BoB World has been reported since July.

RBI's decision for banning BoB World came after a report of Al Jazeera mentioned that the bank's employees were given the task of onboarding customers on the BOB World mobile app when it was launched in September 2021. The task was extensive, and employees struggled to onboard people while they feared getting poor performance reviews from their regional offices.

Hence, these employees revealed to the news agency that they would fetch out the list of bank accounts which were not linked with mobile numbers, and then the employees would link these accounts to any mobile numbers they could gather such as bank staffers, sanitation and security workers and their relatives. The goal of doing so was to generate the one-time password (OTP) which is required to join the application and sign up these accounts.

Thereby, with the latest green signal from RBI comes as a good news for Bank Of Baroda.

As per December 31, 2023, BoB World has witnessed 7.19 million daily transactions, while 28% of the fixed deposits and recurring deposits account were opened from this platform. 86% of IMPS transactions at Bank Of Baroda were through BoB World, while 78% of the BillPay, 86% of digital accessed, and 79% UPI handle generated were through this mobile app.

Bank of Baroda is set to announce its financial results for Q4 on May 10 along with final dividend for FY24. The performance of BoB World will be keenly watched in the quarter.

BoB World was launched in October 2022, for all customers of the Bank and customers are auto enrolled in the programme.The main objective of BoB World is to encourage customers to accomplish milestones through financial and non-financial transactions on bob World. Customers will earn reward points as incentives and can redeem the points from a wide range of products, e-vouchers and charitable causes available in the rewards catalogue on bob World.