Bank of Baroda denies officials inflated mobile app registrations

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Mumbai: India’s second largest state-owned lender Bank of Baroda on Tuesday denied its officials used phone numbers of strangers to inflate registrations on its mobile banking app bob World.   A report by Al Jazeera alleged that bank officials linked bank accounts to unrelated mobile numbers in order to achieve stiff onboarding targets. The report cited internal emails of the bank to state that that branches were asked to conduct a “discreet inquiry" into the issue and to recommend whether those mobile numbers should be withdrawn.   “The bank has a current mobile banking activated user base of 30 million customers, all of whom are linked to a unique mobile number seeded with their bank account," a spokesperson for Bank of Baroda said in an emailed statement.   The spokesperson said a fully system-authenticated and customer consent-based process has been and is currently being followed for undertaking any mobile banking app registrations in the bank.  Bank of Baroda’s app has seen its base of activated users grow from 19.6 million in FY22 to 30 million in FY23, as per data available on its investor presentations.