HDFC Bank has indicated in its conference call with analysts that the lender might not complete fixing its back-end IT issues during the current fiscal. The bank said that its action plan relating to disaster recovery would take 12-18 months, while its immediate plans would take 10-12 weeks.
The country’s largest private bank had reported its Q3 results on Saturday — the first after the RBI pulled up the lender for repeated problems faced by customers in accessing digital banking.
The bank had reported an 18% year-on-year growth in earnings. The bank’s share price rose by over 1% after the results on a day the sensex fell by nearly 1% after its record profit of Rs 8,758 crore.
According to Macquarie research analyst Suresh Ganapathy, the tech resolution will take time and could spill over to end of June 2021.
“They want to be very sure everything is in place, ramp up capacity and then call the RBI for due diligence … As of now, inability to give credit cards has not affected account openings … But if this continues beyond June, we can see some impact coming in the near term… Meanwhile, for others like ICICI and Axis, this is an opportunity to ramp up their credit card base,” said Ganapathy.
The RBI has barred the bank from launching digital initiatives and issuing credit cards until it fixes issues with its IT system and ensures that multiple outages of online services that happened in the past do not repeat.
According to analysts, though it would take time to fix the issues, the bank was optimistic of getting permission from the RBI for a digital lending platform for auto loans.
According to Siji Philip of Axis Securities, the bank has made a representation to the regulator for digital lending for four-wheelers and two-wheeler loans.
“On the restrictions imposed by the RBI on December 2, the bank has made progress according to the plan provided to the regulator. The bank expects to complete the process in 10–12 weeks, which will then be subject to RBI inspection,” a note by Edelweiss said. It added that the bank aims to introduce a digital platform for auto loans in 90 days.
ICICI Securities said that the bank’s credit card portfolio was up 9% quarter-on-quarter despite the ban on acquiring new customers coming into effect from mid-December.
The Delhi High Court on Monday said that according to the Supreme Court’s decision on withdrawal of money by depositors of scam-hit PMC bank for exigencies, exceptions can be carved out for urgent medical and educational requirements.
A bench of Chief Justice D N Patel and Justice Jyoti Singh asked the depositors, whose needs have been highlighted before the court in a PIL, to once again approach the RBI-appointed administratorof PMC bank giving details of their financial needs along for medical or educational reasons within three weeks.
The bench asked the administrator to look into the applications by the depositors and take a decision within a further period of two weeks and communicate the same to the court before the next date of hearing on February 26.
During the hearing, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) told the court that the apex court asked it to consider the educational and medical requirements of depositors as per directives issued by the top bank.
RBI said its directives only provide for considering medical emergencies and not educational emergencies which everyone would have.
The bench, however, said the apex court has clearly mentioned both medical and educational emergencies and it was going to go by that.
The court was hearing an application by consumer rights activist Bejon Kumar Misra seeking directions to the RBI to consider other needs of PMC Bank depositors such as education, weddings and dire financial position, not just serious medical emergencies as being done at present.
The application was filed through advocate Shashank Deo Sudhi in Misra’s main PIL seeking directions to the RBI to ease the moratorium on withdrawals from the Punjab and Maharashtra Cooperative (PMC) Bank during the coronavirus pandemic.
Sudhi, during the hearing, contended that the apex court order had come when the situation was normal and now during the pandemic, the depositors have been able to withdraw only a total of Rs one lakh since restrictions on withdrawals from the bank was imposed by RBI in September 2019.
He argued that it was very difficult for depositors to meet their various needs from just Rs one lakh in more than a year.
RBI argued that while it sympathises with the plight of the depositors, but everyone would have some or the other financial emergency and if money to the tune of Rs five lakh was released to all, as provided in case of medical emergencies, the bank would go under and depositors would not get their entire deposits back.
RBI said it was trying to keep the bank functioning in the interests of the depositors and had floated an expression of interest for investing in it and has received some bids.
The PMC Bank has been put under restrictions, including limiting withdrawals, by the RBI, following the unearthing of a Rs 4,355-crore scam.
Q. How do you view the digital transformation journey of banks in India? Neal: If you see most digital transformations around the world, probably 99.99% of them won’t deliver on their promise, I’m not being contentious, it’s just that I have been long in this industry to see not a single software project being on time and on budget feature and that’s just the reality.
Digital transformation is not about software, 99.99% of it might not fail but might not live up to the expectation or the promises delivered by the consultancies who work in this space.
In many companies and banks over the years great IT capabilities have been built and CTO wanted to transform the architecture to make it more agile and open but got delayed due to budgets or prioritizing new products so it gets delayed and delayed and pushed back in creating agile architecture. The same story is with data, banks are brilliant in collecting data and lucky around data monetization. But historically, they’re bad at data and arrived towards the data monetization party too late. We’ve seen wonderful things with Big Techs and E-commerce giants partying on this free data they’ve got and how they’ve monetized.
Banks, by the time they realized and turned up for the party of data monetization, the police (referring to data privacy issues and scandals happened in the past) arrived and everyone is fearful and positioned as “we take care of your data”. While data is safe in banks but it’s lying and lost in disparate systems and nobody knows who owns the data. Banks should use and move the data within the systems and within the regulatory ambit to enrich the life of consumers and then the whole cycle of budget for the exercise repeats and the transformation exercises takes a back seat.
The biggest challenge with digital transformation is not the technology but the culture and people. Having worked across different organizations and industries, I know what good tech culture feels like. I never wanted to work with a bank, because I had been selling to banks for 20 odd years and I know the culture, the big difference between a tech company and a bank is the approach. Bank’s think from an ownership mindset over systems and its people but tech company’s entire model is partnerships. The second thing I noticed is banks are very hierarchical, micro-management, process based roles and I have never seen in any other organizations.
Thirdly, it’s around risk appetite. Banks are very funny, almost schizophrenic because their entire business model is monetizing risk but are skeptical of taking risks due to regulatory or compliance issues or culture. Capital Markets strive on risk, banks’ business is around pricing risk and Insurance companies model is avoiding risk, if you look at these three level it directly correlates to their innovation capabilities.
Banks need to experiment a lot, while it’s a regulated environment but it can start at small things, rigid processes won’t take it anywhere. Technology, Data & Culture is what will drive digital transformation and by the time banks realise it’s too late.
Digital Transformation should start at “Why are we doing this?” “What outcome do we want?” You don’t have to boil the ocean, just fix the bits and pieces which are going to make money. You don’t have to digitise everything, just digitise which is going to make money.
Do simple cultural transformation, you don’t need to get rid of your staff or hire Google employees. Get people the inspiration to try new things and give them the freedom to enjoy their work life.
On the Indian Banks: Banks in India are huge banks with huge staff bases, you can forgive them as compared to the banks in the West, because in India the smartphone churn came later but banks in western didn’t catch-up with the digital transformation even when they got smartphones quiet before India. The population in India is catching up quickly and banks in India have done a fairly good job.
I wouldn’t put India as the most innovative finance market from the bank perspective on what we are doing! I won’t put it in tier 1 innovation, but overall the ecosystem is doing well.
But I would put India on number one around putting up the national infrastructure Aadhar platform and UPI, etc. Regulators, FinTech & e-commerce have been doing a good job.
Q. How do you view Bank-FinTech collaborations? Neal: FinTechs started with competing banks but then eventually realised it’s too hard to go alone and in most of the cases customer acquisition cost and regulatory compliance is too high. Banks have distribution and FinTechs have tech and speed.
In any megatrend if you see, for e.g. e-commerce, The race between Amazon and Walmart, has merged in between from starting at extreme ends. That’s exactly what we are seeing between Banks and FinTechs. Banks are fintech-y and Fintechs are bank-y- more towards building hybrid models. (Neal explained this in a lighter tone)
FinTechs are agile, quick, focus on the client, think differently and don’t have historical roles and technology and quite a lot of it is not directly regulated. Banks are good at security, trust, products but slow, culture issues and expensive.
I know a lot of banks these days say they are FinTech companies that they magically transformed in such a short period of time but when I meet them they are “bankers”.
Questioning banks, Neal asks, do you want to be a bank or tech company? You’re not good at building softwares but as a bank you’re great at being resilient, safe, secured and reliant system and that’s the sweet spot for bank’s technology team and they’re really good at that and they should focus more on that and stuff which they own like digital banking platforms but if you want to do something new and interesting, in all fairness banks should partner with FinTechs and keep their capability with themselves.
That’s where the world is moving towards where you’ve many partners, for e.g. Neo-banking platforms in India. Banks should partner where it makes sense, usually around the UX, RegTech, SupTech, compliance. It takes an average 9-10 months to sell a technology solution to a bank, if you’re a small FinTech and you’ve got a small sales team, you’ve got to understand, is this going to be successful and qualify quickly, you’ve to understand why the bank is concerned if you don’t do pen testing. It’s changed quite a lot in recent times, banks do have a point. In fairness, banks don’t get hacked, I can’t recall any recent incident where someone hacked into and took all money, it doesn’t often happen because of bank’s control and FinTechs have to learn a lot in that.
Banks and FinTechs can build a nice symbiotic relationship and do things at which they’re good at.
Q. What are your views on neobanking entities? Neal: There are different models in this particular space, a bank rolling out a neobank like DigiBank by DBS Bank, even if it fails the bank can roll it back into its fold like how recently BBVA did it with Simple. The other model is building a digital bank from scratch like Standard Chartered did with Mox in Hong Kong, that’s quite an undertaking and there they’re looking at better operational metrics and it’s to be seen how it performs.
For banks doing this the DBS Bank way could be the right way to go which is a hybrid way essentially cutting your tech stack in half and keeping the backend stuff, put a bus or microservices layer and build net new code on top of that. All the front end stuff is new and over a period of time you can replace the stuff below as customers won’t know about it and at the same time bring changes in the culture.
At DigiBank, the bank staff were in a separate building, they had different reporting lines and slightly different roles but stationed more in an innovation lab kind of space.
The second model is getting a license from a regulator and building a bank from scratch like Xinja, Starling, etc. It’s a start-up; these things cost $50mn just for initial build for a full service bank. It’s funny how people tell me how successful these banks are and I’m like can you come back and tell me how successful they’re when they’ve lent some money or got some deposits. They’re essentially a prepaid card with a mobile application and that’s not a bank.
In fairness, I would not like to do that, it’s an expensive affair. The Xinja team was amazing but got blindsided by Covid-19, set high interest rates, the only way I have seen to succeed in a banking venture is to buy your clients, either buy them through free ATMs, free transactions, like In India, banks offer 7% deposit rates. Some way you’ve got to spend a lot of money to get people on your platform. These models kind of make money, Starling has turned profitable because they’ve a business model which works.
The third type are payment apps like Revolut, Monzo, etc. They do transactions, give flashy cards and everyone’s incredibly proud of their cards. We did one with Razer FinTech where if you tap a card the NFC is enough to light the Razer logo and these apps look to scale up on these transactions and hope they grow. Not all of them have been successful in terms of being profitable.
The fourth type, like neobanking platforms we’ve seen in India and in my mind that’s a brilliant play. You don’t need a license as you’re not storing the data. It goes directly to your partners core platform you’re managing the operations and I think that’s kind of great.
The final type which could be worrisome for traditional financial institutions is the neobanks created by e-commerce and tech companies giants because they’re good at technology and they’ve massive scale.
The top three banks according to me are WeBank (China), MYbank (China) and Kakao Bank (South Korea), because they’ve free distribution and tens of millions of clients, so the cost of customer acquisition is low and they’ve data for scoring.
I like the India model which is putting a wrapper on the bank and it’s a smashing idea. Building a digital bank from scratch is only for the brave but there’s money there as you’re doing the traditional bank model better. These ones like payment models we’re going to see lots of failures because the only way they work is by continuously pumping money.
India has taken the right path, some regulators have jumped on this too quickly in terms of Hong Kong and we might see how it will pan out. Singapore, it’s a tiny market but regulators are pushing as banks are refusing to innovate and taking it slow.
Essentially solving customer’s problems is the main idea, banks have been doing it the monolithic way and that’s what digital disruption is about. It’s not about technology, it’s about someone else solving your customer’s problem better than you and that’s digital disruption. Q. Any advice to the regulators? Neal: My advice to regulators is to read science fiction, what is playing out has already been defined, the future is defined. A lot of it is inevitable, regulators should read science fiction, understand tech megatrends because the way it rolls out affects how people operate in a society and how people will purchase products in future and they’ve a difficult job here.
Even if regulators have a team which thinks about future regulation based on future tech and societal trends you’ll be way ahead of the curve, things like blockchain, cloud-computing, we already have hands on it and we are still waiting for it.
While I did get blindsided by how crypto evolved but generally everything else is talked about and is inevitable. My guidance is around tech and societal trends, think about how regulations need to change in the future with fewer regulations.
The cost of regulatory burden for banks goes up and up every year and in fairness if you’re a regulator your job is to write regulation, if you don’t do that you don’t have a job while I do acknowledge Regulators do a fantastic job.
My point is, you keep adding layers on and on and if you write new stuff can’t you just take some other stuff away or simplify what you’ve done. Secondly, be clearer, it’s a challenge and you can’t be wrong as a regulator and they cannot be specific, and that leads to interpretation problems.
Regulators should use technology to enforce regulations, give out clarity and simplify things. In the last five years they’ve changed a lot and are doing a stellar job.
Welcome to the refurbished site of the Reserve Bank of India.
The two most important features of the site are: One, in addition to the default site, the refurbished site also has all the information bifurcated functionwise; two, a much improved search – well, at least we think so but you be the judge.
With this makeover, we also take a small step into social media. We will now use Twitter (albeit one way) to send out alerts on the announcements we make and YouTube to place in public domain our press conferences, interviews of our top management, events, such as, town halls and of course, some films aimed at consumer literacy.
The site can be accessed through most browsers and devices; it also meets accessibility standards.
Please save the url of the refurbished site in your favourites as we will give up the existing site shortly and register or re-register yourselves for receiving RSS feeds for uninterrupted alerts from the Reserve Bank.
Do feel free to give us your feedback by clicking on the feedback button on the right hand corner of the refurbished site.
In the quarter-ended September 2020, the GNPA ratio of scheduled commercial banks improved to 7.7% against 9.3% in the year-ago period. India’s banking sector did see a decrease in its gross non-performing assets (GNPA) owing to the moratorium offered by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and due to recoveries and higher write-offs by the multiple banks.
Going forward, some believe the stressed asset formation outlook is anticipated to be more benign than what was earlier expected. “The biggest change in outlook has been the formation of stressed assets which, at the start of the pandemic, we had anticipated to be around 10-12% of banks’ loan books. However, based on our recent channel checks with rating agencies, corporate banking heads of banks, consultants and also feedback from KV Kamath Committee, we expect overall stressed asset formation to halve to 5-6%,” said a report by Macquarie Research.
One of the biggest reasons for this is lower restructuring in the corporate segment. Macquarie pointed out that many large corporates haven’t sought restructuring and only a dozen large companies (with exposures greater than Rs 15 billon) have opted for it restructuring. It, however, expects the retail NPLs to increase in the next few quarters and can touch a 10-year high. “We draw comfort from the fact that collection efficiencies (CE%) from September to December 2020 have been high in the mid-90s, despite 40% of the loan book under moratorium as of August 31, 2020. Hence, we have reduced the credit cost estimates cumulatively for FY21E-FY23E by 150bps for private sector and 120bps for PSU banks to 550bps and 650bps, respectively,” it added.
Meanwhile analysts at BofA Securities have also turned hopeful. Anand Swaminathan, Research Analyst, BofAS India, said, “Asset quality is no longer an existential risk in mid-2020, Indian banks’ asset quality has been surprisingly resilient. Our channel checks further support few risks of negative surprises near term. Moreover, new disbursals are already back to above pre COVID levels in most segments. After NPA recognitions are dealt with in 1H, we expect growth tailwinds to emerge in 2H.”
He also believes that capital and liquidity have never been better, and this should help cushion downside risks from asset quality and net interest margins and help further consolidate market share gains in 2021. Further, multiple government and regulatory measures have been a major help for asset quality in 2020 and this will support the growth revival in 2021, he added.
Swaminathan, however, noted new NPA formation could throw some surprises, and this may disturb the pace of growth recovery.
In fact, last week, RBI came out with its Financial Stability Report, in which it said banks’ GNPA may rise to 13.5% by September 2021, from 7.5% in September 2020 under the baseline scenario. The GNPA ratio of PSBs may increase from 9.7% in September 2020 to 16.2% by September 2021; that of PVBs (private banks) to 7.9% from 4.6% in 2020; and FBs’ (foreign banks) from 2.5% to 5.4%, over the same period. Under the baseline scenario, it would be a 23-year-high. The last time banks witnessed such NPAs was in 1996-97 at 15.7%, showed the RBI data.
And in case of severe stress scenario, the GNPA ratios of PSBs, PVBs and FBs may rise to 17.6%, 8.8% and 6.5%, respectively, by September 2021. The GNPA ratio of all SCBs may escalate to 14.8%. This highlights the need for proactive building up of adequate capital to withstand possible asset quality deterioration, said the report.
Most experts view the performance of financial sector will remain under pressure on account of lack of credit uptake, risk aversion, lower fee income and covid-related provisioning, but some banking analysts have predicted light at the end of the tunnel.
“What, however, sets Paytm aside in the game is that we do not depend on any outside player to build on scale and abilities,” he said,” Sharma added.
Paytm founder & CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma on Tuesday said competition in the payments space will become more mature. “In the next two years, every payments business in this country will talk sustainability, profitability,” Sharma said in a conversation with Anant Goenka, executive director, The Indian Express, at the India Digital Summit.
Commenting on the competitive scenario in payments, Sharma observed that much like in other industries there are always several starters after which there will be a period of rationalisation. “When we started as a payments business, our challengers were different, today they don’t exist. And I can say that two years ahead our challengers will be different from those today,” he said.
While the cumulative opportunity was enormous and while it would be ‘fancy’ to count the number of payments transactions, all players he said would worry about whether they can monetise the customer base.
Sharma observed that payments are very fundamental so inevitably various options will exist, including credit cards, though the way these would be used would change. “What, however, sets Paytm aside in the game is that we do not depend on any outside player to build on scale and abilities,” he said,” Sharma added. “There will be face payments too in this country very soon,” he said, “ where faces would be scanned to make a payment”.
Banks and fin-techs are co-existing, Sharma said, adding they are all babies of a regulator called the central bank. “We are happy to have built partnerships with banks. When it comes to tech companies, if there is a level playing field, we are the unambiguous winners,” he said. He said concentration of power could not stop progress in technology else we would not have seen so many technology giants. So many big giants have needed to acquire other companies, he pointed out.
Assuaging concerns around security that arise out of Paytm being backed by Chinese investors, Sharma said “at least in our board and in our operations, we run all our software technology platforms by ourselves…no shareholder has a say on what we should do. Effectively, all shareholders are treated as commercial shareholders. The board seat and the board control is in India’s hands. We at Paytm believe that we would stand for an opportunity that India creates.”
The bank’s gross NPAs as on December 31, 2020, were 7.69% against 16.77% on December 31, 2019, while net NPAs reduced to 2.59% in the quarter under review against 5.46% in the same period last year.
Bank of Maharashtra (BoM) on Tuesday reported 13.91% year-on-year growth in net profit for the quarter ended December 2020 to Rs 154 crore. The rise in net profit was driven by 10.12% y-o-y growth in net interest income to Rs 1,306 crore coupled with net interest margin (NIM) improving to 3.06%. BoM MD & CEO AS Rajeev said it was for the first time in four years that the bank had crossed the NIM of 3%.
The bank’s gross NPAs as on December 31, 2020, were 7.69% against 16.77% on December 31, 2019, while net NPAs reduced to 2.59% in the quarter under review against 5.46% in the same period last year. The bank has made a cumulative Covid-19 provision of Rs 955 crore. According to the Supreme Court order, the bank has not classified these accounts as NPAs but had made additional provision of Rs 150 crore, of which Rs 30 crore was in the third quarter.
Its cost to income ratio had gone down slightly and this was mainly because of a one-time expenditure of Rs 230 crore on wage arrears payable to retired employees and retirement benefits contribution, which was completely absorbed in the December quarter, the MD said.
Rajeev said the bank’s CASA deposits improved by 300 basis points to 50.91%, while provision coverage ratio improved to 90%. There was 22% growth in the retail, agriculture and MSME advances during the quarter. BoM’s retail advances grew 28.89% to Rs 27,540 crore while MSME advances were up 26.31% to Rs 20,304 crore during the quarter under review. According to the MD, this was not just pent up demand or festival sales. The bank expects growth in retail loans to continue in the fourth quarter of FY21 and even improve further. Banks have benefitted from the withdrawal of NBFC from the market, Rajeev said. This has helped in retail growth, so compared to 16%-18% growth last fiscal year, they had seen 26% to 28% growth in the retail loans this year, he added. He expects the NBFCs to bounce bank once the Covid situation is over, but this window of opportunity is available to the banks for another five to six months, he said.
In addition to growth in retail demand, investment in infrastructure and new projects had started pouring in, adding to the optimism, he said. With the government’s PLI scheme, the BoM MD expects a 2-3% increase in the share of corporate loans. Corporate loans now account for 40% of the bank’s advances.
The BoM board has already approved capital raising plans with Rs 2,000 crore to be raised through bonds and Rs 1,000 crore through equity, Rajeev said. During Q4FY21, the bank would look at raising either Tier -I or Tier-II capital of Rs 500 crore through bonds to be utilised next year, he said. They will look at raising equity next year, depending on the situation.
The bank’s total business increased 13.15 % to Rs 2,66,875 crore with total deposits increasing 14.08% to Rs 1,61,971 crore and gross advances were up 11.74 % to Rs 1,04,904 crore. The bank’s net revenues in Q2FY21 grew 15% on y-o-y basis to Rs 1,572 crore.
However, had the bank classified borrower accounts as NPA after August 31, 2020, its proforma Gross NPA ratio and proforma Net NPA ratio would have been 3.42% and 1.93%, respectively, the bank sources said.
CSB Bank on Tuesday reported an 89% year-on-year (y-o-y) increase in its third quarter net profits to Rs 53.05 crore on higher interest and treasury income.
The Thrissur-based lender had reported a net profit of Rs 28.1 crore in Q3 FY20 and Rs 68.9 crore in the second quarter of the current fiscal year. Non-interest income of the lender is seen higher by 130% year on year at Rs 116 crore for the third quarter of FY21 against Rs 50.6 crore in the year-ago period. Total income during the period rose to Rs 599.24 crore from Rs 439.29 crore.
Total deposits grew 16% YoY and CASA ratio stood at 30.4% as on December 31, 2020, against 28.6% as on December 31, 2019. Advances (net) grew at 22% YoY, mainly contributed by gold loan growth of 61%. Managing director & CEO C VR Rajendran said recent revival of the economic activity was having a positive impact on the banking industry as a whole.
“In the context of the withdrawal of the moratorium benefits by the regulator, we decided to be prudent by holding provisions in excess of the regulatory provisions on the stressed assets. Apart from the core NII growth, improved trading income /provision reversals at treasury backed by the favourable yield movements, net income by way of PSLC sale etc supported us on the income side,” the CBS Bank CEO added.
Asset quality improved with gross non-performing assets (NPAs) as a percentage of gross advances at 1.77 % from 3.04 % in the preceding quarter. While net NPA declined to 0.68 % in the December quarter from 1.30 % in the September quarter and 1.98 % in the year-ago quarter.
However, had the bank classified borrower accounts as NPA after August 31, 2020, its proforma Gross NPA ratio and proforma Net NPA ratio would have been 3.42% and 1.93%, respectively, the bank sources said.
Its Provision Coverage has improved to 91.0% as on December 31, 2020, from 84.2% as on September 30 and 80.0% as on March 31, 2020. CSB said that it was holding additionally provision of Rs 154 crore for the stressed assets.
The board has also approved the roll-out of a voluntary retirement scheme (VRS) for its staff members. Rajendran said 223 staff members were eligible for the VRS and the total outgo would be Rs 80 crore if all of them opt for the VRS.
Bankers have been insisting that the high bounce rates are due in large part to defaults at fintech lenders, whose collections are still below pre-Covid levels.
The failure rates of auto-debit transactions on the National Automated Clearing House (NACH) platform, many of which are EMI requests, eased in December, showed data released by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI).
The share of unsuccessful auto-debit requests in volume terms stood at 38.09% in December, as against 40.5% in November. In value terms, the bounce rate in December eased to 29.18% from 31.13% in the previous month. Bankers have been insisting that the high bounce rates are due in large part to defaults at fintech lenders, whose collections are still below pre-Covid levels.
The NACH data showed that of the 84.04 million debit requests for Rs 81,576 crore worth of payments made in December, 32 million requests for Rs 23,809 crore were declined. Bounce rate of anything above 25% is a cause for concern as it shows retail delinquencies remain well above pre-Covid levels.
Analysts said that while bounce rates in value terms have improved over the last few months, in terms of volumes they are persistently high. Anil Gupta, sector head – financial sector ratings, Icra, said, “This shows that smaller ticket-size borrowers are finding it harder to make repayments, as compared to larger ticket borrowers. This trend has been continuing ever since the moratorium was lifted.”
At the same time, asset quality is being closely watched as slippages could soar once the Supreme Court bar against recognition of post-August 31 bad loans is lifted. In a recent report, Emkay Global Financial Services wrote that proforma slippages are likely to be optically elevated in Q3 due to the spillover from Q2 and the elapsing of the 90-day period after the end of the moratorium. “…but our discussions suggest that overall NPA (non performing asset) formation as well as restructuring proposals are meaningfully lower than expected though one needs to be watchful of the tail-end risk,” the broking firm said.
Stress remains elevated in products such as commercial vehicle (CV) loans, credit cards and microfinance loans. Stress on non-bank lenders’ books could also perk up in the December quarter as the quantum of restructuring by them has been limited, Emkay said.
The bank had issued an expression of interest (EoI) on November 3, 2020, inviting investors for a revival or reconstruction of PMC Bank.
The administrator for Punjab & Maharashtra Co-operative (PMC) Bank has set February 1 as the deadline for prospective investors to submit final offers for the reconstruction of the bank. The due diligence process is currently being carried out by three interested parties, administrator AK Dixit told the bank’s depositors in a letter.
The bank had issued an expression of interest (EoI) on November 3, 2020, inviting investors for a revival or reconstruction of PMC Bank. Initially, four investors had shown interest. Further process has been undertaken by three of them. “The investors need to have a full understanding of the financial position of the Bank before giving their final offer. Accordingly, they are at various stages of conducting detailed due diligence. The investors have been allowed time till 01.02.2021 for submission of their final offer,” the letter said.
The bid document put out by the administrator AK Dixit said that the objective of the process of invitation of EoIs is to identify a suitable equity investor or group of investors willing to take over management control so as to revive the bank and commence regular day-to-day operations.
“Subsequent to commencement of the normal day-to-day operations, it will be open for the investor(s) to convert the bank into a small finance bank by making an application to Reserve Bank of India subject to compliance of the RBI guidelines on voluntary transition of primary (urban) co-operative banks (UCBs) into small finance banks (SFBs) dated September 27, 2018,” the document said.
According to news reports, UK-based Liberty Group, a combine of the Centrum group and BharatPe, and two business families from Mumbai and Hyderabad had expressed interest in taking over the bank.
The initial EoI said that an investor should ideally bring in the capital required for enabling the bank to achieve the minimum required capital to risk weighted assets ratio (CRAR) of 9%. They may also explore the option of restructuring a part of deposit liabilities into capital or capital instruments. The bank may approach the Deposit Insurance and Credit Guarantee Corporation (DICGC) for its support to pay up to Rs 5 lakh to depositors. After evaluation, viable proposals will be forwarded to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) for its consideration for preparing a draft scheme of reconstruction and other consequential action under Section 45 of Banking Regulation Act, 1945.
The bank had total deposits of Rs 10,727.12 crore, total advances of Rs 4,472.78 crore and gross non performing assets (NPAs) worth Rs 3,518.89 crore as on March 31, 2020.The share capital of the bank is Rs 292.94 crore. It registered a net loss of Rs 6,835 crore during FY20 and has a negative net worth of Rs 5,850.61 crore.
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