Indian Overseas Bank skips tracing, recovers Rs 75 Cr from defaulters – Banking and Financial News

It may not seem like a very large sum, but Indian Overseas Bank (IOB) claims to have recovered Rs 74.60 crore through skip tracing. This amount was recovered from private borrowers between January and May. According to senior officials who spoke to FE, the bank was able to recover Rs 74.60 crore from 13,197 accounts. These accounts include various loans like Education, Housing, Cleanliness, Liquirent, Pushpaka and others. For the quarter ended September 30, 2016, of the 78,776 accounts the bank reported to a credit information company, 20,545 accounts were reportedly traced. Of these, 13,197 accounts were confiscated.

The maximum amount was recovered from the education loans category – Rs 43.20 crore from 8,556 accounts. The second largest recovery was in the home loan category at Rs 19.63 crore as of 2014 financial statements. “We have done this for NPA retail accounts so far. Now we are thinking of using this to track MSME accounts as well,” said a senior bank manager.

Skip tracing is a method for finding a person who has disappeared without a trace. It leverages comprehensive customer contact information from regularly updated credit reporting databases of financial institutions. The information includes names, addresses, email IDs, PAN, Aadhaar and anything a customer shares as Know Your Customer (KYC) details with a financial institution while applying for a loan or during any other process.

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Credit reporting agencies have tools that associate all records and data available with them to a specific customer in order to provide updated information about an individual. Bankers take their help to find out the latest information about a person whose account has become a non-performing account.

Interestingly, it is also believed that banks generally employ the services of software experts to trace people who have disappeared without a trace, as a credit information company has to work within the limits of the regulations, but there are no limits to a software expert working independently.

A cyber expert FE spoke to revealed there are different ways to locate a person through their emails. “Software professionals sometimes send emails with links to an NPA customer who needs to be found. When the target person clicks on the links, that person's IP address is logged and we can know exactly where the email was opened,” he said.

There are also many websites that offer read notification services. These are not just notifications about whether the sent email was read or not. With a little modification to the script, these websites were able to track exactly where the email was read. Through paid services, they provide details such as date, time, approximate geographical locations, IP address, when the email was read, etc.

Even when customers open an email sent through the services of these websites, the information is logged. “In addition, software professionals and IT companies receive important information from email service providers about a customer’s login as well as information about who communicated with the person via email,” said the cyber expert.