Team Blitz India
NEW DELHI: The State Bank of India’s (SBI) Chairman, Dinesh Kumar Khara, anticipates a loan growth of 14-15 per cent for the fiscal year 2024-25, in line with the current economic growth trajectory. In a conversation with PTI, Khara said, “Normally the way we look at it is that the GDP growth rate plus inflation and 2-3 per cent over that. That gives us the number around 14 per cent or so.
“Hence, 14-15 per cent credit growth depends upon the opportunities available for lending, and it meets our risk appetite. We will be happy to grow at this pace,” he added. Regarding deposits, he noted a growth of 11 per cent in the previous fiscal year.
“And we have some elbow room available in terms of excess SLR and, which ensures that we don’t have any pressure on us to raise the deposit rates for supporting our loan-to-deposit ratio,” he said.
The bank holds an excess of Statutory Liquidity Ratio (SLR) ranging between Rs 3.5 lakh crore and Rs 4 lakh crore. “Incidentally, I may add here that our loan-to-deposit ratio is around 68-69 per cent only. That leaves enough room for us to lend without having pressure on the deposit interest rates,” he highlighted.
“We always give importance to deposits. That is the reason why we increased the interest rate for the short-term deposits recently because we felt that there’s room for improvement…we should improve our deposit growth rate to some extent during this year. And our effort would be that we should at least grow around 12-13 per cent this year,” he said.
Last month, SBI increased the fixed deposit rate by up to 75 basis points on select short-term maturities.
