Bank Of Baroda World App Mess Began With An Innocuous Reward

It's the tale of a leaky app with poor security, and employees and third-party workers gaming the system to earn incentives.

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 Rs 500 for a cake. If a region completes 1,500 daily activations, the reward goes up to Rs 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.