KUALA LUMPUR (Feb 11): Bank Negara Malaysia has required CIMB Group Holdings Bhd to provide “reasonable options” for customers to return excess funds deposited into their accounts by the bank following a processing error in late January.
CIMB was also required not to affect customers’ ability to access their accounts in the process of rectifying the issue, said BNM governor Tan Sri Nor Shamsiah Mohd Yunus.
CIMB had reported a processing error in its banking system late last month, where it supposedly credited funds into customers’ accounts due to erroneous duplicate credits. It is unclear how many customers or how much funds were involved.
According to reports, affected customers said their accounts had been frozen at the time, and that they received messages about funds in their accounts being deducted accordingly, some to the tune of tens of thousands of ringgit.
“CIMB has explained to the affected customers, it has recently detected incidents of excess funds being wrongly credited into their accounts,” said Nor Shamsiah during the fourth quarter 2021 GDP statistics press conference.
“As such, we have required CIMB to ensure that efforts to recover these funds do not affect customers’ ability to access their accounts and to allow reasonable options for customers to return excess funds,” Nor Shamsiah said.
“We are looking into specific circumstances around this incident. We will take appropriate supervisory and [sic] actions if the findings reveal any breach of legal or regulatory requirements including adhering to acceptable risk management standards that we expect all financial institutions to observe,” she added.