SIDBI Chairman & Managing Director
Sivasubramaniam Raman says
at That the lender is leveraging technology platforms from NSEL portal to GST Network to reduce its loan disbursement timeline to just one third, thereby reducing the uncertainties for the borrower.
During the whole pandemic, it was MSME The segment that was the biggest hit. What is your assessment of his kingdom now?
Interventions by the government under ECLGS (Emergency Credit Line Guarantee Scheme) have allowed credit flow to micro, small and medium enterprises which were struggling during the pandemic. Those entities got credit of about Rs 3.5 lakh crore. The move has prevented all of them from slipping into the non-performing asset category. Large amount of handholding has been achieved through the combined efforts of reserve Bank of India and government.
Is the repayment on time?
MSMEs have made a comeback. Repayment is almost normal. Small units employing limited number of people are likely to see bad loans. The total credit exposure in the micro segment is less than Rs 5 crore. We need to provide additional benefits to this particular segment. Large institutions showed tremendous flexibility.
How is technology changing your lending and refinancing processes?
Today we are completely digital. We are encouraging our executives to have their own laptops to help customers fill in the details of loan applications. We run algorithms to assess businesses. Our credit appraisal system flows completely digital. Our payments are now completely digital. This is a central distribution.
Your Fund of Funds has an approval of Rs 7200 crore for a start up, but the disbursement is only Rs. 2,500 crores. Why the gap?
This is a fund of funds. We have approved more than 80 AIFs, which in turn have invested around 700 companies. So, the amount of sanctioned amount is around Rs 7,200 crore. It has to go over a period of time. No company wants huge amounts of money. Money is always released in installments. You are given a period of four to five years in which you deploy the fund. We will see an increase in the disbursement rate going forward.
Banks themselves are doing priority sector funding. Will this affect the business of SIDBI?
The future cannot depend on priority sector shortfall funding. We are now looking at better risk management and better lending. Our goal is to do as much work as we can to make our book on direct funding. We are getting a lot of data and using digital tools, my whole monitoring system is getting automated. We have worked with a few fintech companies to master the art of understanding GST data.
Of the total book of Rs 2 lakh crore, 80 per cent is refinance, and the rest is direct borrowing. How much do you aim to raise?
We are targeting rapid balance sheet growth. We have 80 branches. NBFC Refinancing is something we want to develop. NBFC should get the benefit of my market borrowing. We examine NBFC portfolio.