Indian Overseas Bank seeks out debtors, recovers Rs 75 million from defaulters – Banking & Finance News

It may not look like a very large amount, but Indian Overseas Bank (IOB) claims to have recovered Rs 74.60 crore through defaulter tracing. This amount was recovered from retail 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, cleaning, liquirent, pushpaka and others. For the quarter ended September 30, 2016, out of the 78,776 accounts that the bank had shared with a credit tracing company, 20,545 accounts were recovered. Of these, recoveries were made from 13,197 accounts.

The maximum amount was recovered from the education loan category – Rs 43.20 crore from 8,556 accounts. The second largest amount was recovered from the housing loan category – Rs 19.63 crore from accounts dating back to 2014. “We have done this for retail NPA accounts so far. Now we are thinking of using this for MSME accounts too,” said a senior bank official.

Skip tracing is a method of locating a person who has disappeared without a trace. It uses comprehensive contact information of customers from credit bureau databases that are regularly updated by financial institutions. The information includes names, addresses, email IDs, PAN, Aadhaar and anything that a customer provides to a financial institution as Know Your Customer (KYC) details while applying for a loan or during any other process.

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Credit bureaus have tools that allow them to match all the records and data they have to a specific customer to provide up-to-date information about an individual. Bankers use their help to find out the latest information about an individual whose account has become a non-performing account.

Interestingly, it is believed that banks generally also use the services of software experts to track down people who have disappeared without a trace. This is because a credit reporting company has to work within the framework of regulations, whereas an independently working software expert is not bound by any restrictions.

A cyber expert FE spoke to explained that there are several ways to track a person through their emails. “Software experts sometimes send emails with links to an NPA client that needs to be tracked down. When the target person clicks on the links, that person's IP address is logged and we can find out where exactly that email was opened,” the expert said.

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

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