Exclusive: 11 AGMs among 60 staff suspended by Bank of Baroda over digital app row

Public-sector lender Bank of Baroda (BoB) has suspended over 60 employees, including 11 AGMs (assistant general managers), according to people familiar with the matter.

"AGM-level officials are scale V officers who generally hold positions of area managers, zonal heads, and oversee heads at over 25 branches," said a BoB employee.

Moneycontrol has reviewed the suspension letter of one of the employees. The action is part of the rectification drive based on the former’s audit of the BOB World app case .

In the suspension letter, the bank accepted that serious irregularities were committed by the employee during his tenure by way of feeding numbers in the customer account and subsequent registration and deregistration of BOB World application without the consent of the customers.

Moneycontrol is withholding the name and the designation as requested by the employee.

The bank said, prima facie, the referred acts of commission and omission warranted a department inquiry against the employee after the conclusion of the department inquiry, it seems proper to suspend the employee from service, the bank said.

‘Rectification drive to continue’

Most of those suspended are from the Vadodara region, another person familiar with this matter told Moneycontrol.

"Mostly, people from the Vadodara region have been suspended now. We may see this drive continuing in other zones like Lucknow, Bhopal, Rajasthan and some areas of eastern Uttar Pradesh," he said.

Also Read: Bob World app case: A look at the issue and the regulatory action it triggered

One of the suspended employees told Moneycontrol that he will get only one-third of salary during the suspension period.

"If the bank finds me guilty, it can give me a punishment posting or can even sack me. If not guilty, the bank will give a compensation salary of those months,” he said.

An email sent to BoB, seeking comments, remained unanswered till the time of publishing this report.

On October 16, Moneycontrol reported that BoB may soon file a rectification report based on its audit of the World app to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in the next two weeks.

"The RBI had suspended onboarding of new customers to our BOB World app," an official had said. "We are doing a rectification drive and hoping to send a report to the RBI in the next two weeks," he had said.

The RBI, on October 10, directed BoB to stop onboarding new customers to BOB World, the lender’s digital banking application.

“Bank of Baroda should suspend, with immediate effect, any further onboarding of customers onto the BOB World mobile application. This action is based on certain material supervisory concerns observed in the manner of onboarding customers onto this mobile application,” the central bank said in a press release on October 10.

Earlier, in July 2023, media reports said that BOB World was tampering with customer accounts. The report alleged that the lender linked the contact details of different people to increase the number of mobile application registrations.

On this, the lender said that unauthenticated or non-customer mobile numbers for boosting app registrations are factually incorrect.