Recovery Agent: You might have often seen or heard banks or their agents threatening customers in the name of loan recovery, but this will not happen from now on. Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has issued draft guidelines to ensure that borrowers are treated fairly during the recovery process.
In this, banks and their recovery agents have been prevented from using harsh or coercive methods. These new rules will be applicable to all commercial banks and housing finance companies (HFCs) except Regional Rural Banks.
Now every call will be recorded
The new rules clearly prohibit abusing or threatening during recovery, harassing by calling repeatedly, insulting in front of everyone, warning about the consequences of non-payment. All these new rules are going to come into effect from July 1 this year. Feedback on the draft can be given till March 4.
Under the draft guidelines, banks will have to create a special system to resolve complaints related to recovery. Apart from this, the bank will have to keep track of how and how often the recovery agents are calling the customer for loan recovery. Every call of the recovery agents will be recorded and every time they will have to talk to the customers politely.
This advice was also given to recovery agents
In the draft, RBI has also proposed that the recovery agent will now be allowed to talk only to the person taking the loan. Will not be able to contact relatives or other people. Apart from this, recovery agents will be able to call or meet customers between 8 am to 7 pm. They will not be allowed to do this after or before that.
Between 8 am to 7 pm, agents have also been instructed to avoid recovery efforts on sensitive occasions like someone’s grief, family emergency, wedding or festival. The draft calls for recovery agents to undergo training and after completing the program for debt recovery agents, they will have to obtain certification from the Indian Institute of Banking and Finance.
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