Tag: small finance bank

The recently turned SFB is looking to raise Rs 100 crore growth capital from institutional investors.

Harsh Mittal, Chief Financial Officer, Shivalik Small Finance Bank in a conversation talks about the fundraising and expansion plans.

Maiden Fundraise

Mittal said, “This is the first raise we are going to raise funds as a small finance bank and there wasn’t a debt in the market that existed for co-operative banks before and this is the first raise the bank is going to do.”

He added, “We are looking to raise Rs 100 crore in this year and hopefully do it in next quarter for which requisite board approvals are in place. Board has given the scope to increase the amount.”

This is growth capital as the bank has already invested heavily in the digital and tech infrastructures in the past. Mittal said, “Most part of this capital will be used as growth capital towards ramping up disbursements and growing business to achieve our stated targets. This year we want to grow the business by 50% and increase the total business size to Rs 3000 crore and by 2024-25 we want to triple the size by Rs 6000 crore.”

Debt-Equity

Mittal explained that the great part is that the balance sheet has a lot of flexibility as we don’t have much debt on our balance sheet. Most of our capital adequacy is in Tier1 equity so this Rs 100 crore we are largely looking at equity raise and there’s a small component which will also be raised from debt.”

He adds, “80:20 split would be a reasonable number and are appointing investment bankers to run the process for us and the names will be finalised by the end of this month or mid-July.”

The bank is looking to onboard an institutional investor base including insurance companies especially the ones who already are in tie-ups and a couple of private equity players who have been investing in the SFB space. The idea is to broaden the investor base as at the moment it is broadly retail, Mittal said.

Credit Disbursement

The bank’s 50% of the book is secured business loans and will continue to focus on that.

Mittal explains, “One of the differentiating factors for us is that as an SFB 90% of our book is secured either by property or gold collateral. So we are a very secured lender in that sense and only 10% of our book is MFI.”

He adds, “Our focus would be on secured and gold loan business. The gold loan book has doubled in the last year and we plan to increase it further substantially again. Now that lockdowns have eased up we would want to cater to small businesses too.”

Expansion Plans

Shivalik Bank will be opening branches in unbanked regions as per the norm of RBI and is aiming to open 15 branches in FY22.

Mittal said, “This covers us on the regulatory requirement and in addition to regulatory requirement we are also looking at expansion in adjoining states in Delhi & Uttarakhand as we are already present in UP and Madhya Pradesh. On the digital side, we’ve tied up with India Gold for gold-related business and this year we are looking to add more FinTech partnerships which would help us to source customers on the liability side as well.”

Impact of Second Wave

The NPA recognition case in the Supreme Court didn’t allow it to issue recovery notices or proceedings. Mittal explained, “Since that got lifted towards the end of March, April was much better for us as we were able to issue some of the proceedings, and as a result borrower discipline was improved on the secured side.”

There was no major challenge in collection efficiency as due to the secured nature of our book, customers were more amenable discussing how they can improve their position and we don’t have large exposures in any of the currently challenging sectors like hospitality or aviation impacted due to Covid-19. Our book is very granular and the average ticket size is Rs 4 lakhs, said Mittal.

The bank saw restructuring of less than half a percent of its book in FY 20-21 and Gross NPA at 31 March 2021 was 3.9% which is expected to remain largely unchanged in Q1 21-22