KCB Bank has dismissed the processing of Hustler Fund loans to customers and onboarding into the platform without National Identification Cards following a recent audit by Auditor General Nancy Gathungu that exposed irregularities linked to the kitty.
According to a letter addressed to the Financial Inclusion Fund Chief Executive Officer Elizabeth Nkukuu in response to Hustler Fund audit queries raised by the Office of the Auditor General, the bank noted a failure in its IT system.
KCB Bank revealed that the system failed to update customer records due to technical errors, which could have resulted in the irregularities pointed out by Gathungu.
According to KCB Managing Director Anastacia Kimtai, the lender noted four records were for Safaricom customers while one was for Airtel upon investigations.
“The system failed to update their records over a transient technical issue. We note for the Airtel customer (25473****143), they borrowed once and fully repaid, and as at the time of this response, they had no outstanding loan,” she said.
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Further, she said that the bank is working with service providers to identify and update the national IDs of the affected customer profiles after the auditor general shared a file with five records of customers who had been onboarded on Hustler Fund products without national IDs.
The auditor also noted that there were loan IDs used to process more than one loan, whereby 867 loan IDs were used to process 1,978 loans, amounting to Kes 477,928.
“On investigation, we noted that this remained consistent with the product rule of one loan per customer at a time up to their credit limit. These were cases of customers topping up their existing loans, but within their assigned credit limit. For loan top-ups as opposed to new loan requests, the system maintains the same loan contract (loan ID) as a principal increase to the existing loan,” Kimtai clarified.
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