Need another aggregator to protect financial institutions against fraud, says DFS secretary

Banks

Financial institutions need another aggregator to protect them from fraud on the lines of what NPCI does for the banking sector, M Nagaraju, secretary, department of financial services, has said.

“We also believe that there is a need to have another aggregator which will protect the financial institutions from fraud,” Nagaraju said at an Indian Banks’ Association event on January 24.

The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) also provides a broad monitoring solution to allow banks to enable them to generate alerts and decline transactions for fraud mitigation by using artificial intelligence and machine learning-based models, he said.

In December, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) introduced a beneficiary account name look-up facility for Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) and National Electronic Funds Transfer (NEFT) systems to reduce the possibility of wrong credits and fraud.

Earlier, the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and Immediate Payments Service (IMPS) systems enabled a remitter to verify the beneficiary's name before initiating a transfer.

According to RBI’s annual report, in FY24, bank frauds went up 166 percent to 36,075 from the previous year.

Nagaraju said the pension industry needs greater participation, adding 90 percent of the assets are concentrated in three fund managers — SBI, LIC and UTI pension funds. The vision of Viksit Bharat means active participation from all agencies.