Bank of Baroda customers wrongly debited with NEFT and RTGS fees

MUMBAI: Over 8000 customers of state-run lender Bank of Baroda found their current and savings account erroneously debited with NEFT and RTGS transaction charges after the process of upgrading the bank’s core banking software led to technical glitches in the NEFT, RTGS and outward clearing-related transactions.

“Approximately 8300 accounts were also impacted on August 19, 2017 on account of erroneous debit of service charges that were not due from the customers,” the bank said in a statement on its website dated August 22. “These charges have since been reversed and impacted customers have been duly informed via SMS on August 20, 2017.”

The bank is migrating its core banking technology platform to the latest Finacle version 10.x that is aimed to provide enhancement in services to its customers. According to the bank a similar upgradation exercise was carried out on August 12-13 which was carried out smoothly. The bank has a customer base of over 73 million who are been migrated to the new system.

Despite the appeal made by the banks via SMSes, notices in newspapers and a similar communication on its website customers panicked after seeing multiple auto-debits from their accounts.

“Considering the massive scale and magnitude of the upgradation, there have been some glitches in the NEFT/ RTGS and Outward clearing related transactions, which have been addressed by our team on a war footing basis around the clock and have largely been fixed ever since,” the statement said. “Intermittently, there have been challenges such as the speed of the systems, which we are currently addressing; we expect this process to be completed during the course of this week.”

Bank Of Baroda