Digital Background Checks for Banking Employees Are Essential?

The growth of the banking sector in India at present is at its best. In fact, over several years, the banking industry in this country is growing at a steady pace. The reason behind this is manifold, for instance, increasing rural penetration, rising disposable incomes, mobile banking services, internet expansion, and many more. Not only the banking sector has observed such growth, but the NBFCs’ are also growing at a faster pace. Despite such a bright outlook of India’s banking sector, the picture is not all hunky dory as it appears. The rising cases of accounting fraud, identity thefts, money laundering, and asset appropriation are becoming a great concern for the industry and the public. And, it is no hidden secret that a majority of these scams are committed by insiders.

Therefore, there is an increasing need for performing background checks on candidates before hiring them as employees in the banking industry. Just by scrutinising resumes and interviewing candidates, it is not possible to verify candidates. A conventional background-checking process with tons of paperwork, also may not offer fruitful results. Therefore, financial institutions are now depending on the digital BGV process for several reasons.

So, let’s find out why is it necessary to conduct a digital background check for aspiring banking employees. But before we go into that let’s first check out what the digital BGV process includes.

How Does Digital BGV Process Help to Recruit Genuine Candidates in Banking Industry?

Digital tools like #Digiverifier offers a comprehensive digital background verification process that includes several verifications to cross-check the claims of the candidates/employees. Let’s check out some of the types of the check, and the process included in the digital BGV process.

Employment Verification

Verification of the candidate’s data is done against tamper-proof data sources. Thus, employers can easily find out current details about candidates and identify who are lying to secure a position in the banks and NBFCs. The process that is followed by Digiverifier for digital employment verification has been explained here.

Step 1: Digital Verification:

Here, the candidate’s past service details are reviewed based on three outcomes: Green, Red, and Amber

1. Green: When the outcome is green, other checks are conducted.
2. Red: In case the outcome is red, no other checks are conducted, and the case is closed as BGV Red. This indicates that in the verification process no discrepancies have been found.
3. Amber: Now, if the outcome is Amber, then other Legacy methods are performed.

Step 2: Legacy Method

1. Under this method, the employment documents and details of the candidates are collected.
2. These documents are verified by the employers.

UAN Check

Further, with a candidate’s Universal Account Number (UAN) that has been allotted by the EPFO, Digiverifier conducts an #UANCheck and helps to reveal the current employment details of the candidate.

Education Verification

Candidates also lie about their educational qualifications in their resumes. To find out candidates’ educational certifications and qualifications, tools like Digiverifier perform thorough educational verification.

Digiverifier procures educational details of candidates from Digilocker if the details of the candidates are available there. Otherwise, the details are gathered from the respective colleges/universities. The candidate’s name is run through the different known/trusted and unknown/fake colleges and universities. Thereafter, the information that is collected is further checked in three ways.

• Verbal verification: This verification is done over telephonic conversations, and the call records are maintained.
• Written verification: A written verification is procured via the college/university’s official email ID or on a letterhead duly signed and stamped by the respective institute.
• Stamp: All the educational documents are signed and stamped duly by the institute’s authorities.

Address Check

Address check is also conducted by Digiverifier. It helps to validate whether the candidate has offered the right personal details. The check is conducted in three steps.

Self-digital: Here the verification is done of the given address by checking the candidate’s GPS coordinates along with the image of the house, nearby landmark, and locality in a few hours.

Physical check: In this case, an agent visits the address mentioned by the candidate. The agent checks the stay duration, ownership type i.e., whether it is rented or owned by the candidate, the applicant’s and verifier’s relation, and the ID of the verifier in a few days.

ID Check- PAN and Aadhar: The Pan ID, and the address details mentioned in it are validated from the ITR database. Similarly, the details in the Aadhar are verified from the UIDAI database.

Criminal Verification

Digiverifier also helps to verify whether the candidate has any criminal history against him/her from the court record system (e-court) with the help of a law firm with a seal and signature.

Reference Verification

Reference verification helps to reveal the details of the candidate’s professional behaviour. Additionally, this check also helps to reveal whether the candidate is impersonating, and replacing his/her details with another person’s details.

To conduct the reference check, a telephone or email verification is obtained, which helps the employer to get information about the candidate’s personal integrity. Also, from the professional references that are given to the candidates, information about the candidate’s educational and professional backgrounds can be obtained. While this is applicable for experienced candidates, in the case of freshers, all such details are obtained from the respective candidate’s educational institutes or reputable citizens.

Drug Test

Performing the digital BGV process, the employers can also find out whether the candidate uses drugs or other banned substances. This check is done in partnership with both national and international level drug screening labs. The labs that conduct this test can perform a 10-panel drug test.

Top Reasons to Conduct Digital Background Checks for Banking Candidates

Let’s check out the reasons here.

To obtain employment details of candidates

It has become common for candidates to embellish their resumes with false information just to come across as impressive candidates to employers. They can lie about their work experience, the places they have worked, and in what capacity. They can also lie about their salary details and mention projects that they falsely claim to have participated in and more. The banking industry is an area where honesty is of great value because employees have to handle sensitive information. Therefore, hiring candidates who are not experienced or trained in this particular area can be a misfit, and result in a bad hire. A proper digital BGV process can help to find out such candidates and allow the financial organisation to hire suitable candidates.

Digital tools like #Digiverifier will help to reveal the employment details of the candidate with the help of UAN check, and other verification methods.

For instance, Digiverifier recently helped an employer to filter genuine candidates by conducting employment verification. The client here was conducting a recruitment drive for 20 vacant positions and wished to recruit candidates who had 4+ years of experience. However, 200 candidates unexpectedly appeared for the interview, and this was huge in volume. So, the employer wanted to minimize the number of candidates for the next round. Also, he wanted to hire only genuine candidates. Digiverifier helped to instantly reveal genuine candidates who had 4+ years of experience, and the employers could engage them in the recruitment process and prevent a bad hire.

To ensure consumer information is in safe hands

As mentioned before, financial institutions like banks and NBFCs are institutions on which the public places their trust. These institutions have access to accounts, cash, and sensitive document of many types. So, in an era where cyber-attacks and data breaches are happening at a large scale, it is extremely important to ensure that customer information is in the right hands.

Performing digital background verification on candidates such as criminal check and reference verification with the help of tools such as Digiverifier will help employers to stay assured that the candidate they are hiring has clean work history, and have in the past adhered to industry regulations.

Protecting the company’s assets

Hiring an employee in a financial institution simply means that he/she has access to sensitive information, financial resources, accounts, etc. So, you need to hire employees on whom you can place your complete trust with the company’s assets. Therefore, you need to become assured that the candidates you are welcoming onboard have no criminal past, committed any theft, involved in drug abuse, or shown any sort of troubling behaviour in the past. For all these assurances you can rely on the digital background verification process. By performing criminal history verification, drug test, employment, and reference verification, employers can easily know about the candidates thoroughly.

To offer a great client experience

For a financial institution to run successfully, reputation plays a very important role. Besides these, expert knowledge, high-quality services, and integrity of the workers help to enhance the experiences of the clients. And, for all these reasons they would prefer to partner with your company to others. Thus, a pre-employment background check is considerably important to know whether the candidates after becoming employees can deliver their services accordingly or not.

A proper digital employee background check will help to uncover candidates who are not suitable and help you to engage only the genuine candidates in the recruitment process.

Conclusion

The banking sector is the backbone of the economy. It is a sector that the public and other organisations rely on for their financial safety and growth. So, this sector requires employees to deal with sensitive personal and financial information. Therefore, you would not want such important data to end up in the hands of someone who is not reliable. Thus, hiring a trustworthy and competent employee is very important for this sector. This is where digital BGV tools like #Digiverifier can come to the rescue of the banking industry as it helps to find out tamper-proof information about the candidates. And, allow banking organisations and NBFC companies to hire candidates who are genuine, and have the right expertise. If you wish to know more about Digiverifier, you can get in touch with us.