Indian bankers are taking to the streets with megaphones, enlisting grocers to woo customers while trying to lure cash deposits to fund the fastest credit growth in a decade.
Rising credit demand from businesses and consumers has pushed annual credit growth to a decade high of 17.95% in October, compared with a five-year average of 9.7%, Reserve Bank of India data shows. However, deposit collection has not been able to keep up and is still holding close to its five-year average of 9.4%, prompting bankers to look for ways to attract deposits.
Lenders must compete for liquidity with stocks and debt securities, which offer better return opportunities than bank deposits. With inflation rising to a five-month high of 7.4%, according to the government, real yields on bank deposits, which in most cases are around 6% a year for two years, remain negative.
“Banks are funding most of the credit growth from liquidity built up by coronavirus deposits as lending slowed,” said Krishnan Sitaraman, deputy chief rating officer at CRISIL Ltd., the Indian unit of S&P Global Ratings. “You have to prop up the deposits now.”
A video of an official at Canara Bank, a state-owned Indian lender, promoting its deposit plans via a megaphone on sidewalks in the outskirts of Mumbai has gone viral on Twitter. A spokesman for the bank declined to give details of how many of its officials are resorting to this strategy to raise funds.
Meanwhile, Axis Bank Ltd., which reported a 70% year-on-year increase in net income in the September quarter on loan growth, is teaming up with corner shops to attract new customers. The lender is “making the franchise work up a sweat” to collect deposits, Ravi Narayanan, the lender’s head of retail debt, branch banking and products, said in a media briefing.
Lenders are also raising deposit rates to make it more attractive to customers. The State Bank of India has hiked interest rates on some deposit plans by as much as 60 basis points over the past 30 days, data available on its website shows.
“There is no doubt that deposit rates will continue to rise as banks may not want to slow down the credit growth that has occurred after many years,” said Pritesh Bumb, senior analyst at DAM Capital Advisors Ltd. Five of the country’s six largest banks have reported earnings for the most recent quarter either met or exceeded analysts’ expectations as income from loans rose.
However, according to estimates by Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Rena Kwok, credit growth is likely to outpace deposit growth by the end of March.
