Corporation Bank has set up retail and SME loan centres to speed up loan processing time.
The bank’s General Manager V.S. Karthikeyan told Business Line that the bank has set up 28 retail loan centres and 16 SME loan centres till date. Going forward, it plans to have another 9 SME loan centre and a couple of retail loan centres before the end of the current fiscal.
“We have a retail loan centre in Coimbatore. The SME loan centre is being launched here on December 5,” he said.
The bank would focus on retail lending and the SME segment, as the industry is witnessing a shift to SME. This segment has registered a 35-40 per cent growth year-on-year, he added.
Karthikeyan was in the city to inaugurate the fifth edition of its two-day ‘Home and Car Loan Expo’ at Suguna Kalyana Mandapam here.
Justifying Corporation Bank’s focus on retail and the SME segment, he said, “the slowdown in Europe and the US economies had impacted corporates much more than small and medium businesses. There has been some slackness in new ventures because infrastructure projects did not take off. The situation is showing signs of improvement; we have, in the meantime, restructured some of the stressed accounts internally.
“Our focus would be on NPA recovery as well in the coming months. We are referring the stressed accounts to CDR (Corporate Debt Restructure), wherever restructuring is possible; formed a rehabilitation cell in our Head Office as per Government instruction,” he continued.
The bank, according to Karthikeyan is speeding up the loan recovery process through the Debt Recovery Tribunal and various other machineries.
Asked if the bank refused loans to corporates, he said “we are not negative to projects that are viable, but these are few and far. Cluster approach seems best at this juncture and consortium lending encouraged as opposed to multiple bank lending, as exchange of information between different banks is not happening.
The bank is targeting a total business of Rs 3-lakh crore this fiscal, he said