PSBs hiring senior tech experts in bid to ramp up cybersecurity

Commenting on increasing cyber crimes at banks; Duggal said that banks have to realise that cybersecurity is not a lip service or a tick-mark exercise.

Public sector banks (PSBs) are looking to hire tech and cyber security specialists after the recent issues in the digital banking services of some PSBs, three top bankers told Moneycontrol.

After the recent issues with UCO Bank and Bank of Baroda, top executives of three PSBs said that they are looking to hire digital and cyber security specialists to further strengthen their core and front-end systems. UCO Bank, on November 10 reported an issue with its IMPS server, and Bank of Baroda's digital application, bob World, was involved in fraudulent practices.

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“We are hiring a Chief Digital Officer (CDO) and we have placed an advertisement for the same,” said a top banker from the Bank of Maharashtra, who did not wish to be named.

Similarly, the country’s largest bank, State Bank of India (SBI) is looking to hire tech and digital experts.

“When it comes to hiring tech and digital officers, we see that there is a crunch in the market. But we are constantly looking to hire more talent,” said Balaji Rajagopalan, Chief Technology Officer (CTO), SBI.

In an interview with Moneycontrol on November 1, Indian Overseas Bank (IOB) said it plans to hire cybersecurity experts. “We are going to hire new cybersecurity experts. We have all the internal approvals in place and we will soon go forward with the advertisements,” said AK Srivastava, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer (MD and CEO).

Technical woes of PSBs

On November 10, UCO Bank suffered a technical glitch that caused transactions initiated by holders of other banks and to be credited to UCO Bank account holders without actual receipt of money from these banks. In an exchange notification on November 15, UCO Bank made a clarification that it has made the IMPS money transfer option offline.

“We wish to clarify that there was no issue with the IMPS platform,” UCO Bank said in a statement.

Also read: UCO Bank takes IMPS money transfer facility offline after technical glitch

Before that, starting from July 2023, Bank of Baroda’s digital mobile application BoB) World, was involved in tampering with customer accounts where contact details of different people were linked together to increase the number of mobile application registrations.

After this, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) asked state lender Bank of Baroda to stop taking new customers through BoB World. RBI also said that any further onboarding of customers on the app will be subject to rectification of the deficiencies observed and strengthening of the related processes by the bank to the satisfaction of RBI.

Following the RBI direction, BoB released a clarification stating it has already carried out corrective measures to address the concerns highlighted by the RBI and is taking further steps to plug any remaining gaps. And on October 18, Moneycontrol exclusively reported that BoB had suspended over 60 employees, including 11 assistant general managers.

Additionally, RBI’s annual report for the financial year (FY) 2022-23 showed that the number of frauds in the banking sector has increased to 14,264 incidents from 8,407 incidents.

Also read: Union Bank tells staff not to communicate with senior management on social media

Private lenders reported 8,932 incidents compared to 5,332 in FY22 and PSBs reported 3,405 incidents compared to 3,075 last year.

Taking note of the rising fraud in the banking sector, some media reports said that the Finance Ministry alongside the parliamentary panel on Information and Communications Technology (ICT) will hold meetings with the RBI, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai), Telecom Department and the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), among others.

What do experts say?

Srivastava of IOB said that the bank monitors its tech and cybersecurity space at a branch level. “There should not be any shortcuts in monitoring and our bank’s central office has a very efficient and effective team monitoring our IT and cybersecurity aspects,”.

Additionally, experts said that banks need to boost spending on their core tech and hire specialised officers.