The Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) move to introduce Unified Lending Interface (ULI) in digital financial infrastructure has been accoladed by all the stakeholders due to its beneficial consequences. But the scamsters have become nervous and jittery. Let us discuss their worries in detail.
The property scamsters work at two different levels- 1. making original looking duplicate of property papers and 2. taking mortgage loan/bank guarantee/CC limits from banks and financial institutions over such duplicate papers. They are capable in fooling the financial system and mortgage same property several times. For them, the punishment under CrPC section 420, 467 and 468 (older sections) are negligible in terms of risk-reward ratio. They will have to face same tenure of jail term whether they mortgage fake papers only once or a dozen of times.
How do the property scamsters fool the banks and financial institutions? How are they able to bypass the check and balance system placed in such institutions? They take advantage of the fact that there is lack of information sharing among the financial institutions. The information that a particular property has been mortgaged is not freely available to the other financial institutions. The scamsters take advantage of this. Similarly, the property documents are in physical form and there is always a probability of ‘deepfakes’ being created. This can only be rectified through digitization of property records. Unified Lending Interface (ULI) has a solution to all these loopholes.
The Unified Lending Interface (ULI) will ‘facilitate seamless and consent-based flow of digital information, including even land records of various states, from multiple data service providers to lenders.’ Dissemination of digital information of land records and other properties will put an end to mortgaging same property again and again. It will cut down time in loan disbursement due to easy legal validation process.
The RBI Governor has said that the ULI architecture will have common and standardised APIs, designed for a ‘plug and play’ approach to ensure digital access to information from diverse sources. This will reduce the complexity of multiple technical integrations and enable borrowers to get the benefit of seamless delivery of credit, quicker turnaround time without requiring extensive documentation.
The RBI has a long-term plan of digitising citizens’ financial and non-financial (like property documents) assets and put them at one digital platform of ULI. This will help in dissemination of information in real time and facilitate easy access to credit across various sectors of economy like farmers, MSME, salaried class etc.
No doubt, with the new trio of JAM (Jan Dhan account, Aadhar and mobile phone)-UPI (Unified Payments Interface)- ULI (Unified Lending Interface), the RBI is geared up to change the landscape of Indian financial system. A nightmare for the scamsters!
