Amid growing menace of non-baking finance companies (FBFCs), the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has taken shelter of e-platform in order to make the depositors’ money secure. The apex banking regulator of the country has come up with a website ‘Sachet’ where all the information regarding legitimate finance companies able to accept pubic deposits has been displayed.
Informing about the development, RBI Regional Director MK Verma said that the bank was in the process of making the platform more and more popular and responsive.
“We are witnessing growing cases of financial cheatings happening especially, in rural areas of Jharkhand and other parts of the country. This prompted the RBI to build an electronic platform where anyone can visit and verify with the list given for genuine NBFCs. We hope that this would infuse greater transparency and information among the depositors,” said Verma on Thursday.
Notably, several cases relating to financial frauds and of chit fund companies decamping with hard earned money keep popping up from different parts of the State whereas there is not a single NBFC registered with the RBI to accept public deposit. Nevertheless greater attention has forced the companies now to shift their modus operandi.
“Since attention is growing up, several NBFCs are converting into cooperative societies. We held a meeting of state-level sub committee on Thursday involving the State Government and other regulators of NBFC sector like SEBI, Registrar of Companies and National Housing Bank etc in this regard and has told the Cooperative Department to check with them and seek proper papers,” added Verma, who also cited lower penetration of banks in rural and semi-urban areas of eastern and north-eastern part of the country, including Jharkhand as a reason for flourishing unauthorised NBFCs.
“The RBI after licensing 21 new private banks to open braches has also gone ahead with the idea to empower post offices for banking services. We are on the verge of rolling out Postal Payment Banks (PPB) which would be operated from all the post offices. The post offices would be equipped with CBS for electronic payment system and ATMs. Postmen would work like Banking Correspondents,” said the Regional Director and added that the PPBs would start functioning by March 31, 2017.
The State level Coordination Committee (SlCC) meeting also saw the delay in designating courts to hear cases under PID Act, which is for financial cheat matters, raised again. “The High Court is to designate such courts which would be from the existing courts functioning. We have to wait and see how much time it would take. We believe that couple of districts courts would be designated in the State to hear PID cases once or twice a week,” said Verma.
Also, the State Government has been requested to relax 12 per cent interest cap under moneylenders act even for NBFCs since the companies do micro financing to small and marginal persons in rural areas after availing loan from commercial banks at the rate of 10 per cent. The matter is pending with the Finance Department for approval.