Piramal Finance, a leading housing finance company, has opened its first all-women branch “Maitreyi” in the country at Tripunithura, a suburban area in Kochi.

This is part of strategic expansion and the company has identified four more cities such as Jaipur, Mumbai, Mohali and New Delhi to open branches shortly, said Jairam Sridharan, Managing Director, Piramal Finance.

Asked about the reason to choose Kerala for opening the first branch, he said it is one of the States where 50 per cent of the customers are women, while the figure is 20 per cent in the rest of the country. Kerala is also a market where 70 per cent of customers are self-employed, while the rest are from the salaried class. In other parts of the country, he said the salaried class constitutes 40 per cent and 60 per cent are self-employed.

Each Maitreyi branch will have a dedicated team of 7-15 women employees to cater to the needs of customers which offer a range of services including home loans, MSME loans, and so on. House construction and property loans are the most sought-after product category with an average ticket size of ₹12 lakh and ₹15-17 lakh loan against property.

With the addition of the new branch, he said Piramal Finance now has 18 full-service branches in Kerala and the company is looking at a 500 strong branch network across 1,000 locations in the country this year. “We are doing a business of ₹20 crore in Kerala per month which would scale up to ₹50 crore by this year-end”, Sridharan adds.

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To a question, he said the company is seriously considering to enter into gold loan financing but it requires some infrastructure requirements before starting the venture. On the economic front, he said currently there is a sound environment for lending in the market with very low credit risk and high demand, which is a positive sign.

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