THE UGLY UNDERBELLY OF BOB'S APP USAGE FIASCO

"Gandha hai par dhandha hai," says a man in a recording of a conversation accessed by Mint. That Hindi saying, loosely translated, means that a dirty job is still a job.

- Shayan Ghosh

The man speaking is apparently a senior information technology (IT) official at Bank of Baroda (BoB). During this conversation with a colleague, in March this year, he explains how to exploit a loophole in the system to open new accounts and inflate onboarding on the bank’s mobile app, called ‘bob World’.

At the time, BoB branch officials could tap a link to open accounts using their personal mobile phones. To thwart any unwarranted use of the link, the bank has a ‘maker and checker’ function, where one person initiates the opening and another verifies it. The account opening had to therefore be authorized at the back-end before transactions could happen. However, in the interim, the bob World app could be downloaded by the registered mobile number, and though it could not be used, the registration would add to the app’s user numbers.

In the recording, the IT official tells his colleague to reach out to his friends and acquaintances and use their voter identity cards to open accounts. It did not matter if these accounts never see the light of day at the verification level since they had already served the account opening purpose and added to bob World activations, ramping up the count.

Under intense pressure from their seniors, some BoB employees used this and other questionable and unethical methods to ramp up registrations. Seniors at India’s second-largest state-owned lender pushed relentlessly to inflate user numbers without assessing if customers actually required the service on offer. More importantly, the seniors did not seem to be aware of what was transpiring on the ground because of their ‘pressure’, with customer consent norms being bypassed in order to comply with their app activation goals.