While the bank in its latest annual report signed by the outgoing chief executive had listed several digital-centric innovations to enhance the product suite and improve customer access. Nitin ChughThe new management has kept sustainability as its top priority, putting everything else on hold for the time being.
The annual report said the bank plans to increase its payments and ecommerce presence through fintech partners and business segments such as gold loans, agriculture loans and loans to small and medium enterprises in FY22.
A senior executive close to the current management told ET, “Forget all this, our first focus is to stabilize the portfolio and the organisation.
Ujjivan founder and former managing director Samit Ghosh, who has been brought back on the bank’s board as an additional director, declined to comment.
Chugh resigned last month citing personal reasons. It is widely seen that
, the holding firm for the bank, was unhappy with Chugh’s handling of asset quality following stress caused by the pandemic. The promoter expressed concern over the high level of exit of several senior and middle level executives.
The gross non-performing assets of the bank increased from just 1% at the end of June to 9.5% as on March 31, 2020. The dropout rate was around 20%.
After Chug exited, the group was selected carol furtado, who was a founding member of Ujjivan Financial Services as its interim chief executive. Chugh will officially leave the bank on September 30.
“We expect FY12 to be a year of reasonable growth and stabilization as we focus on improving our earnings, maintaining a healthy portfolio quality with an emphasis on digitization,” Chugh said in the FY21 Annual Report. keep.” .
The bank’s digitization process accelerated during his two-year tenure.
“Going forward, we aim to strengthen our end-to-end process digitization efforts and harness the power of digital as a new customer acquisition and service channel,” the bank said in its annual document to shareholders. “We will also leverage the power of analytics for actionable insights to drive data-driven decision making. We will continue to leverage our full-stack API banking platform to partner with the fintech ecosystem for a faster time to market and innovative products and solutions for our customers.
While the first half of the financial year for Ujjivan went by by navigating through the pandemic-led crisis compounded by the second wave, the next three to four months will be invested in bringing stability across the board and at the management level. Several board members, including chairperson B Mohapatra Mona Kachhwaha, Ittira Davis and Harish Devarajan, had left in the past few months.
The new management will also focus on an impending reverse merger over the next few months. The bank, which completes five years of operations on January 31, 2022, is permitted by the Reserve Bank of India to reverse merge itself with the holding company.