Indian Banking has taken shape from the UK Banking laws. One of the principles that Banking has followed for a long time is trying to be secretive about the fraud losses at least in the individual balance sheets of Banks for the fear of adversely affecting consumer confidence.
It however appears that the winds of change are blowing across UK which needs to be also emulated by India. I recently came across a website of ukfinance.org.uk where comprehensive fraud statistics for the Banking and payment card industry has been provided. This would be very useful for the Cyber Insurance industry to develop its products and also for the industry and law enforcement to understand the risks and take mitigation step.
In India, RBI has been very reluctant to provide such details and even on RTI applications are taking the stand that they donot segregate fraud data in such detail.
May be it is time that RBI changes its stand and start publishing such data regularly.
Naavi
