Godrej Housing Finance (GHF) has launched a ‘design your EMI’ home loan product to enable customers to customise their equated monthly installments (EMIs). This is aimed at optimising their cashflows and bring down the cost of home ownership.
Manish Shah, MD & CEO, Godrej Housing Finance said EMIs can be tailored to suit customers’ requirements —a customer might want to start with a smaller EMI and gradually increase it or start with a bigger EMI (since expenses are down in Covid-19 times) and normalise it.
For example, when a customer puts down money to buy a home, with the possession date being 12-24 months later , the finances can be challenging —if he is currently staying in a leased accommodation, rent needs to be paid and there is EMI for the new house, he said.
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“Suppose, EMI for a ₹50 lakh loan is about ₹40,000. So, the customer can start with small EMIs — ₹10,000 a month in the first year; ₹20,000 a month in the second year…The EMI can go up slowl,” he said.
“There can be another scenario where the customer feels that since some of his expenses have come down in the pandemic, he wants to increase the EMI to, say, ₹60,000 a month. Later on when the expenses go back to normal, the EMIs can get normalised to ₹40,000 a month,” explained Shah.
Launch of customised EMIs
The GHF chief emphasised that his company, which started its operations in November 2020 and is seeking to build a balance sheet of ₹10,000 crore in three years, offers an assisted journey for designing EMI for customers.
“The whole team is trained to handhold the customer for trying various permutations and combinations. They will customise it (EMIs). We have launched this in Pune. Now we are rolling it in all our markets (Mumbai, National Capital Region and Bengaluru),” he said.
On the service front, the company has piloted an end-to-end digital home loan sanction process, whereby the loan sanction process is completed without the customer and GHF employee coming face-to-face. This ensures that both are not put at risk in the current pandemic times.
“We have initiated this (end-to-end sanction) process with over 100 customers between May and now,” Shah said.
According to ICRA, GHF is currently owned by the Godrej family through Anamudi Real Estates LLP (AREL). The entire shareholding of GHF is proposed to be taken over by Godrej Industries (GIL) through Pyxis Holdings (PHPL).