BANKS ASKED TO REVIEW BC OPERATIONS

To scale up the business correspondent model, the boards of banks must review the operations of BCs at least once every six months and position of their payment of remuneration, RBI said today.
While issuing guidelines for commercial banks to scale up the BC model, RBI said that insistence by banks on BCs to fully prefund their accounts even after considerably long business relationship has become a major impediment in scaling up operations of BCs.
Also, delayed payment of remuneration of BCs and passing on the responsibility of insuring cash to BCs have been proving to be irritants in increasing the usage in large number of bank accounts opened.
RBI said that boards of banks must review the operations of BCs at least once every six months with a view to ensuring that requirement of prefunding of Corporate BCs and BC Agents should progressively taper down with the passage of time. With a view to scale up the BC model, the responsibility for insuring cash should rest with the banks, RBI said in a notification. The board should also review the position of payment of remuneration of BCs and should also lay down a system of monitoring by the top management of the bank, it said. These decisions have been taken to scale up BC model after announcement in RBI bi-monthly policy statement earlier this week, the apex bank said.