Tag: S&P Global Ratings

Indian banks brace for bad loans with stronger balance sheets, says new S&P report, BFSI News, ET BFSI

Banking & Finance

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Indian banks’ prior efforts to strengthen their balance sheets will help them mitigate the impact of asset quality as bad loans ticked higher in the April-to-June quarter following a deadlier wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new report by S&P Global Market Intelligence research.

“Banks have been taking steps to fortify their balance sheets over the last year or so to face the asset quality impact. These have been through enhancing capital base, increasing provisioning cover and having adequate amounts of liquidity,” said Krishnan Sitaraman, senior director at CRISIL, a unit of S&P Global Inc.

The June quarter saw gross NPAs rising, mainly in retail and small and medium-sized enterprise portfolios for banks.

“That is because these segments have been impacted more by the pandemic and the lockdown measures. The pandemic’s second wave has had a much larger health impact and geographical spread as compared to the first,” Sitaraman said.

State Bank of India, the country’s largest lender by assets, reported total nonperforming loans of Rs 1.36 lakh crore for the fiscal first quarter that ended on June 30, up from Rs 1.28 lakh crore in the previous three months and Rs 1.31 lakh crore in the same period of 2020.

ICICI Bank, the second-biggest private-sector lender, said its gross nonperforming assets rose by Rs 7231 crore in the first quarter, mainly from its retail and business portfolio. State-run Bank of Baroda reported fresh slippages of Rs 5129 crore in the first quarter, versus Rs 2740 crores in the prior-year period.

During the fiscal first quarter, Indian banks saw higher-than-expected slippages of more than 200% year over year that largely arose from retail and SMEs, according to an Aug. 16 research note from Jefferies.

Slippages were higher than expected as new COVID-19 restrictions affected collections, Jefferies analysts said, adding that some banks have started to recover in July and normalcy may return in the fiscal second or third quarter.

India’s economy took a severe hit during the second wave of the coronavirus, with the number of daily cases peaking above 400,000 in May. Cases have tailed off in recent weeks as the government stepped up vaccinations.

Still, the high number of COVID-19 cases and deaths are expected to have had a bigger impact on the economy in terms of jobs lost and businesses shut. Also, most forbearance measures announced last year, including a Supreme Court order stopping banks from classifying delinquent loans as nonperforming assets had been lifted after the economy recovered from the initial wave of infections.

Banks are now seeing the full extent of borrower stress with a one-time debt restructuring facility and the Supreme Court’s standstill on NPA recognition no longer available.

“In the absence of regulatory measures such as moratorium, the gross NPA formation due to the recent wave of COVID-19 is being upfronted in the first half of the current fiscal [year] for the system, including us,” said Sandeep Bakhshi, CEO of ICICI Bank, during a July 24 earnings call. Bakhshi expects the bank’s gross NPA additions to be lower in the second quarter and “decline more meaningfully in the second half of fiscal 2022,” based on expectations of economic activity.

Stress tests by the Reserve Bank of India indicated that the bad loans of all banks may rise to 9.80% by March 2022 from 7.50% in the same month of this year under a baseline scenario. However, the bad loans ratio could rise to as high as 11.22% by March 2022 under a “severe stress” scenario for key macroeconomic indicators, the central bank said in its biannual Financial Stability Report released July 1.

“Many banks have set aside higher provisioning buffers and raised capital in the last one year or so. This should help them absorb the rising stress in their retail book,” said Nikita Anand, an analyst at S&P Global Ratings.

“On the other hand, banks with lower provisioning buffers and weaker capitalization could see a sharp impact on their profits and capital levels,” Anand said. “This could be more acute for banks with significant underlying exposure to small business owners or unsecured retail products where loss given default could be higher.”



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S&P, BFSI News, ET BFSI

Banking & Finance

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Global ratings agency S&P said has said its base case is that the global banking sector will continue to slowly stabilise as the economic rebound gains momentum and as support is gradually withdrawn. Should a re-intensification of risks occur, this will require more support from public authorities for the real economy.

For 11 of the top 20 banking jurisdictions, S&P estimates that a return to pre-Covid-19 levels of financial strength will not occur until 2023 or beyond. For the other nine, it estimates that recovery may occur by year-end 2022.

Strong support

The strong support by authorities for households and corporates over the course of Covid-19 has clearly helped banks, it said.
Lenders were also well-positioned going into the pandemic after banks bolstered their capital, provisioning, funding and liquidity buffers in the wake of the global financial crisis. S&P Global Ratings expects normalisation to be the dominant theme of the next 12 months as rebounding economies, vaccinations and state measures help banks bounce back much more quickly than was conceivable in the dark days of 2020.

“We see less downside risk for banks as economies rebound, vaccinations kick in and banks feel the stabilising effects of state intervention,” said S&P Global Ratings credit analyst Gavin Gunning.

“With no vaccine in October 2020, we believed at the time that 2021 could be a very difficult year for banks. State intervention on behalf of corporates and households — including significant fiscal and monetary policy support — is working and banks have benefited,” said Gunning.

Improving outlook

S&P’s net negative outlook for the global banking sector improved to 1 per cent in June from 31 per cent in October 2020. As at June 25, about 13 per cent of bank outlooks were negative. This is significantly lower than October 2020 when about one-third of rating outlooks on banks were negative.

Credit losses

Credit losses for Asia-Pacific banks could reach $585 billion by 2022, or nearly double the pre-Covid level raising credit costs for banks, S&P Global had said in June.

The credit costs of the Indian banking system may rise to 2.4 per cent by March 2022, compared to a base case of 2.2 per cent, according to the S&P report, “Intervention Worked: Credit Losses Set To Decline For Most Asia-Pacific Banks”.

“In India and Indonesia, where banks have suffered higher asset distress in recent years, the credit losses are set to trend closer to our expected long-term average in the coming years,” S&P had said.

Moratorium cushions blow

S&P had said moratoriums on loan repayments–together with fiscal, monetary, and policy support–have helped cushion the blow to borrowers in Asia-Pacific from the Covid outbreak and containment measures.

Credit losses are set to fall across most Asia-Pacific banking systems over the next two years, partly because targeted assistance to stretched borrowers will likely continue in many places until pandemic-related challenges substantially abate, it had said.



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Cyber attacks on banks can trigger more rating action, warns S&P, BFSI News, ET BFSI

Banking & Finance

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The banking sector is becoming more exposed to cybercrime after the Covid pandemic accelerated digitalisation and remote working, which can impact ratings, S&P Global Ratings said on Tuesday.

Cyber attacks can harm credit ratings mainly through reputational damage and potential monetary losses, the ratings agency said in a report titled ‘Cyber Risk In A New Era: The Effect On Bank Ratings.’

Banks and other financial institutions are attractive targets for cyber criminals because they possess valuable personal data and play a critical role in servicing particular financial or economic needs and segments.

“Cyber attacks have had only a limited effect on bank ratings to date but can trigger more rating actions in the future as cyber incidents become more frequent and complex,” said Credit Analyst Irina Velieva.

Weak governance

Institutions with weak risk governance are less prepared for, and therefore more vulnerable to cyber attacks, it said.

“Although it is crucial to learn from previous attacks and strengthen cyber-risk frameworks in real time, the appropriate detection and remediation of attacks takes precedence because the nature of threats will continue to evolve,” S&P said cyber defence will become an increasingly important part of entities’ general risk management and governance frameworks, in need of increasing spending and more sophisticated tools.

“We acknowledge, however, that this might not be straightforward for many entities, especially the ones with weaker risk-control frameworks and insufficient budget allocated for cyber defence.”

Threats to banks

According to RBI’s annual report for 2019-20, the amount involved in banking frauds grew 2.5 times to Rs 1.85 lakh crore in 2019-20 compared with Rs 71,500 crore in 2018-19.

The internet banking system works through a wide set of applications, networking devices, internet service providers, and many other entities. All of these are potential entry points for attackers.

Several banks and financial establishments use third-party services from other merchants and fintechs. If those outsider merchants don’t have appropriate security set up, the bank could land in a soup.

Under spoofing, hackers find a way to imitate a financial institutions’ website’s URL with a website that looks and functions the same. When customers enter their login data in an impersonated website, the data is then taken by the cybercriminals to utilise it later.

Cybercriminals can utilise a person’s personal and financial data and commit fraud. A privacy breach in a bank can also lead to the information of the bank’s customers being sold or purchased on the dark web by other cybercriminals.



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