Bank Of Baroda World App Mess Began With An Innocuous Reward

If a Bank of Baroda branch activates 30 connections on the BoB World app in a day, they get to host a celebration with the branch staff and customers, with a daily budget of ₹ 500 for a cake. If a region completes 1,500 daily activations, the reward goes up to ₹ 1,000.

What started as an innocuous celebration of daily activation targets soon turned into a heaping mess of operational issues, fraudulent manipulation of technical loopholes to win further incentives and a war of words between the senior management at the bank. 

On Saturday, BoB’s Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer Debadatta Chand surprised reporters on a conference call by openly calling out the lender’s former Chief Digital Officer Akhil Handa.

When reporters quizzed Chand on Handa’s sudden exit on Nov. 1 even as the bank was dealing with the aftermath of regulatory censure, he said that the exit was a termination of services. Chand also said this was part of a series of administrative actions taken by the bank in the BoB World app case as it found irregularities.

This was the exact opposite of Handa’s claim that he resigned on his own  as part of a long-planned exit.