Banking News : 08/09/2015

• Modi to meet corporate chiefs, top bankers today :
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley will meet top bankers, industrialists, and economists on Tuesday to discuss the state of the economy. The meet will set the tone for the Prime Minister’s visit to the G20 leaders’ summit in November. The Finance Minister, who has just returned from a G20 meeting, will brief the gathering on the economic situation and the impact of the recent global developments on the economy. Officials from the Finance Ministry, including the Chief Economic Advisor Arvind Subramanian, are expected to make a presentation.

• RuPay plans MUDRA Bank co-branded card for businessmen :
National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) will roll out a credit card and another card that will be co-branded with MUDRA Bank, to increase the penetration of RuPay Cards. NPCI also plans to raise around Rs.100 crore through private placement by the end of this year. RuPay Card is an Indian version of credit/debit card and is similar to Visa and Master cards. Chairman of National Payments Corporation M.Balachandran said RuPay has classic cards, platinum cards and kissan cards. The proposed card with MUDRA Bank would cater to entrepreneurs, he said, and a credit card would be launched next year.

• No major credit offtake so far this fiscal : SBH MD : 
There has not been any significant credit offtake in the corporate segment in the current financial year so far, according to Santanu Mukherjee, Managing Director, State Bank of Hyderabad (SBH). He said the bank was focussing on lending to the retail, micro, small and medium enterprises besides the farm sector. SBH has stepped up efforts to recover bad loans. The aim was to bring down the gross non-performing assets to 4.5 per cent by the end of this year from 5.14 per cent at the end of last year.

• Re must fall more to save exports : SBI :
As the rupee touched a new 2-year low, State Bank of India chairperson Arundhati Bhattacharya on Monday said it must fall further to help domestic exporters. "It (further fall in the rupee) is required, otherwise exports will become absolutely unviable. It is important to maintain parity. It can be achieved only if the rupee is allowed to depreciate further," Bhattacharya told PTI when asked about the impact of the yuan devaluation on the country

• RBI may cut policy rates by over 50 bps this fiscal : DBS report : 
DBS Group Research has revised its rate call to include 50 basis points more rate cuts by the Reserve Bank of India in 2015-16 (FY16), the first of which is likely this month. This comes in the backdrop of slower growth and faster-than-expected pullback in inflation. Since the beginning of the current financial year, the RBI has cut the repo rate only once by 25 basis points from 7.50 per cent to 7.25 per cent on June 2 in the second bi-monthly policy review. Radhika Rao, Economist with Singapore-based DBS Bank, said, “Given easing inflation and waning growth momentum, pressure continues to build on the RBI to cut rates. It is likely to be a close call”.

• RBI has less stringent norms on systemically important banks: Moody's : 
Ratings firm Moody's has taken a dig at the Reserve Bank of India's (RBI) guidelines on systemically important banks (SIB), saying that its measures were less than desired and short of global standards. "RBI's implementation of its SIB framework appears less stringent than that of other jurisdictions, which appears to be related to the capital stress that banks in India are currently experiencing," Moody's said in a report on Monday. It said that designating just two lenders as systematically important, instead of four or six, is a credit negative for Indian banks. "The RBI's capital surcharge is lower at less than 1%, and the RBI's timeline for complying with the capital surcharges is longer, despite the presence of the less stringent capital requirements," Moody's said.

• DCB Bank looking to double biz in 3-4 years : 
DCB Bank plans to double its balance sheet size in the next three to four years, as it sharpens focus on retail and small and medium enterprise (SME) lending, Murali M Natrajan, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, said. The private sector lender is eyeing 25 per cent annual growth in its retail and SME loan books to double its balance sheet from the current Rs.16,500 crore, Natrajan told. Retail and SMEs account for about 80 per cent of the bank’s total loan book of Rs.10,500 crore.