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Aditya Birla Finance, a non-banking finance company (NBFC), will foray into unsecured lending with personal loan and business loan segments from January.
“We want to focus on personal loans and business loans to SMEs (small and medium sector enterprises)…Granular business will be our focus. We will begin from January 1…It will be part of our retail business but as a separate vertical,” said Rakesh Singh, Chief Executive Officer, Aditya Birla Finance, in an interaction with BusinessLine .
Without giving any target, Singh said they have built the capabilities and hired an internal expert who was earlier in charge of collection and fraud control.
On the reason for venturing into the segment, Singh said, “The performance of the unsecured lending has increased over the last five years and growing. The credit bureau data is also quite rich and the data makes it complimentary for us to tap the space.”
He added that the company will target the group’s 1.30 lakh-odd employees to grow its business to begin with. Currently, the NBFC operates five business segments, including capital markets, mortgages, corporate business and structured finance.
Last year, the lender also ventured into housing loan business and within its first year of operations grew its lending book to ₹880 crore as on September 2015. “We plan to enter 30 cities by March 2016 (from 26 cities as on September) and reach 60 cities in a year’s time. Our target is self-employed individuals and our average ticket size is ₹50-60 lakh. Affordable housing is a good opportunity but we need different capability for the same. We will look at the segment for sure,” Singh added.
Fund raising After raising ₹3,000 crore via NCDs earlier this year, Aditya Birla Finance will look at raising about ₹450 crore by March 2016.
“We raise money to address our growth needs and the funds raised worth ₹3,000 crore via NCDs earlier this year, has been deployed. We will need capital this year and we have budgeted at about ₹450 crore by the end of March 2016. The mode of capital raising will be decided by the promoters and management soon,” Singh said, adding that the company will grow in the SME, mortgage and retail businesses at present.
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