Customers of India's fourth largest state-owned bank, the Bank of Baroda (BoB), have been asked not to panic after a technical glitch caused thousands of accounts to be wrongly debited.
The error was the result of the state-owned bank's migration to a new version of its core banking system, according to a statement. Roughly 73 million customers were being a moved to the new Finacle platform and this caused some customers to suffer the automatic debiting of money from their accounts, particularly transactions via India's nationwide electronic payments systems National Electronic Funds Transfer (NEFT).
"However, there is no reason to panic and we are working with Infosys and Oracle to resolve the techncial issues at the earliest," said a Bank of Baroda official quoted by Indian personal finance publication Moneylife.
The issues first arose on August 12th when 8,300 accounts were wrongly issued wth service charges which the bank said had been subsequently reversed. But despite the bank's efforts to assure customers that any wrongly debited cash would be reimbursed, a social media-induced panic set in among many customers worried that the heavy losses and bad loans experienced by India's state-owned banks in the last year would mean they would not see any compensation.
The ongoing IT issues at BoB are also unwelcome news for Infosys, the Indian IT services firm that develops the Finacle core banking software at the centre of the trouble. Earlier this month the Infosys chief executive quit, complaining of interference from the company's founders.
The unexpected resignation led to a fall in the company's share price. Since then, a number of board member's have offered their own resignation's in order to pave the way for founder and former chief executive Nandan Nilekani to return as a crisis manager for Infosys.