Reeling under two frauds, one relating to bill discounting and the other relating to outward forex remittance, Bank of Baroda plans to centralise many of its processes and also set up a centralised transaction monitoring unit to ensure that these incidents do not recur.

New MD & CEO PS Jayakumar said “I think the issue is we have a problem. The fact is we are losing some money. But all of this requires us to do some kind of root cause analysis and look at the whole thing together.

“I think we are working more towards centralisation of many of the processes we have got as against the distributed arrangement that currently exists today.”

Jayakumar explained that this move will also give the branch and frontline staff time to focus on sales and customer acquisition. It is also going to bring consistent approach to processes, review processes and compliance processes, etc.

BB Joshi, Executive Director, said BoB is planning to have a centralised transaction monitoring unit, where all the alerts that get generated (from branches) are monitored. The entire gamut of transactions will be taken care of by this unit.

When opening a new current account, customer profiling is going to be more robust now.

“We have also put a cooling period of initial six months in any current account to allow outward remittances, particularly relating to imports without proof,” said Joshi.

The bank has also floated a request for proposal to invite experts to study its internal compliance systems, find the gaps and suggest corrective action plan. In addition to this, for its overseas territories, six of them which are more sensitive than others, also a similar exercise is being undertaken.

Joshi added that the bank has already put in process special audit of all the authorised forex branches.

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