The Reserve Bank of India has asked banks to connect their CBS systems with the SWIFT messaging system by April-end. The directive comes in the wake of the scam in Punjab National Bank, where an employee circumvented CBS to send guarantee advisories on the SWIFT messaging system to correspondent banks. It is noticed that several Indian banks have not linked their CBS system to the SWIFT network. RBI is understood to have identified several points of possible lapses and have asked banks to plug these loopholes within a specified period of time. These included setting a limit on payment instructions on SWIFT where the beneficiaries were individuals and putting an additional layer of security on transactions beyond a certain threshold.
