The Hindu Business Line : GE Money India seeks partners for personal loans, mortgage biz

GE Money India is scouting for a strategic partner for its wholly-owned personal loans and mortgage businesses, the newly appointed CEO and President, Mr Iqbal Singh has said.

“My priority would be to find a strategic partner for personal loan and mortgage businesses so that it would fit in with our rest of the model. I also want to look for new opportunities for growth. It may look from outside that we are selling off and getting out. I won’t be coming here to India if we are looking to completely exit these businesses”, Mr Singh told Business Line here today.

New CEO

Mr Singh, who is to take over as CEO and President of GE Money India from February 1, said that GE Money India was even prepared to give up controlling interest in the wholly owned personal loans and mortgage businesses to the identified strategic partner if a strong brand, good customer base, distribution and products are brought to the partnership.

Prior to the new role as CEO and President of GE Money India, Mr Singh was Chief Marketing Officer for GE Money Asia and CEO of the Singapore business. In India, Mr Singh replaced Mr Vishal Pandit who has now decided to pursue opportunities outside GE.

On his new role, Mr Singh said that he was “pretty excited about India” given its growth trends. “We think the future is here. We want to invest in India and want to grow. We have a great platform of businesses in place. We need to see how we can up the scale in terms of momentum and get to scale much faster than we had originally hoped”, he said.

Way Forward

Stating that partnerships are really the way forward, Mr Singh said that such tie-ups in various markets including Korea, Indonesia, Turkey, Latin America and India create the synergies that work well for GE Money.

“Increasingly, we are looking at partnerships as the way to go. In a way this is not new to us. We would tie up with large retailer groups and launch finance program or cards under their name. Those were more in the nature of a programme. We have now taken it to the next level where we are actually running the partnerships. That’s the way we see us growing. In the same way, we don’t want to keep GE Financial Services in India as standalone. We are looking for strategic partner that would help it to scale,” he said.

Growth Drivers

GE Money already has partners in India in State Bank of India (credit card joint venture) and Wizard (home loans). GE Money India has also signed a Memorandum of Understanding with LIC of India.

Mr Singh saw mortgages and credit cards as big growth drivers of GE Money India in the coming years.

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