Several Founders, Co-Founders, CXO Bankers, CXO Fintech professional & people who participated in the ePanel discussions:
- Mr. P D Singh, Former General Manager, Bank of Baroda
- Mr. Arun Tanksali, Co-founder & CTO, Nearex
- Mr. Anand V, Vice President & Product Head- NRI Business, Kotak Mahindra
- Mr. Abhishek Arun, Senior Vice President, Paytm
- Mr. Vikas R Panditrao, Co-Founder, Forum of Industry and Academic Knowledge Sharing (FIAKS)
- Many other CEO/CXO Bankers & Fintech professionals on FIAKS Forum requested to remain anonymous
Religion is an integral part of most Indians’ lives. It is on your face everyday right from the morning aartis, good morning greetings in WhatsApp and even bhajan groups in local trains. So this time FIAKS community members put forth a worthwhile question: Why having religion as part of the account opening KYC data point be an issue?
Well, as a bank policy the religion-based discrimination is not available:
- The thought process of inclusion of religion in the credit scoring model itself is highly flawed. This seems to be a pure and simple attempt to introduce discrimination on the basis of religious identity.
- On the basis of religious identity to develop this system just and only to analyze fraud seems to be very flawed logic, a racist ideology.
- The scoring algorithm can be built basis the name, address and any common repository or database which can be available or updated by the bankers with the repeated cases. In a way these shouldn’t be disclosed in public but as a cross-check it can be done.
- This is also a case of an inductive fallacy that is deriving universal or generalized conclusions on the basis of singular or particular instances.
- How can statistical correlation be drawn between two variables as religious identity & frauds?
- It is like mumbo jumbo scientism: every time the group/tribe carries out a ritual dance there is plentiful rain /harvest etc. Correlation is not causation.
- The other aspect to consider is that religion is a special data as per GDPR guidelines and can only be obtained basis a specific signed consent by the client to capture and use his religion data.
In short, Banking cannot be ideology-driven. Racism and bigotry must not be allowed in mass banking.
Now let’s introspect into why adding religion as a data point shouldn’t be such big an issue?
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