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The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has said bank boards should do a detailed scrutiny of their quarterly and annual financial results in their board discussions. According to seven critical themes prescribed by the P J Nayak committee, instituted by RBI that reviewed bank boards’ governance, the latter should look at their financial reports, including non-performing assets (NPAs) management and reported NPA and provisioning integrity.
In the first bi-monthly monetary policy statement of 2015-16, RBI had proposed to do away with the Calendar of Reviews and replace it with the seven critical themes. These include business strategy, financial reports and their integrity, risk, compliance, customer protection, financial inclusion and human resources.
RBI said it has been observed that the Calendar of Reviews uses considerable board time and, as a result, the board might not be in a position to give focused attention to matters of strategic and financial importance. The committee had also recommended that discussions in the boards need to be upgraded and greater focus should be given to strategic issues.
According to RBI, business strategy would include development of new products; competitiveness of individual businesses; business reviews in relation to targets. Risks would include policies concerning credit, operational, market, liquidity risks; assessing the independence of the risk function.
Compliance would include regulatory requirements; adherence to the RBI and Securities and Exchange Board of India norms; observations from the annual financial inspection by RBI, among others.
Customer protection would look at mis-selling, particularly third-party products; laying down the appropriateness of products to different customer segments; understanding the broad trends among others. Financial inclusion would look into review of priority sector lending; payments for the disadvantaged; deposit mobilisation from weaker sections; support to microfinance institutions; and other issues.
The theme human resources would look at appointments and approvals of directors, perks and perquisites for employees, incentive schemes for employees, promotion policies for employees, training and skill development of employees.
