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HS Upendra Kamath, Chief Executive of Tamilnad Mercantile Bank, had no inhibitions in admitting that he is a “workaholic”.
“I always believe that one must keep myself engaged; whether the economy is in the pink of health or not, there is business,” he said, when asked if he was happy with his achievements (at TMB) over the past year. Excerpts:
What is your take on the slackness in credit offtake?
One need not draw oneself into a shell regarding credit.
Even today in difficult times, we can grow at 14–15 per cent. Don’t put all eggs in one basket; look at dispersal of risk.
At TMB, we managed to bring down net NPA to 0.6 per cent last year. The size of our restructured loan book is ₹1,200 crore and this is a cause for concern.
Are you looking at specialised branches to grow the credit portfolio?
We are planning to set up specialised MSME branches. We have already set up one in Tuticorin and plan to add five such branches during the current fiscal.
We opened a centralised retail loan processing cell last March in Tuticorin. We plan to open seven to eight such processing hubs this year.
We are also planning to open one pilot NRI branch this year, located either in Kerala or Coimbatore.
Full-fledged corporate branches will come up later, but within a short span of six to seven months, the corporate cells have already managed to build an incremental portfolio of not less than ₹1,500 crore.
Are you planning a pan-India network expansion?
Our presence in Tamil Nadu is largest (85 per cent of the branch network is here). We have board approval for opening 50 branches. The network hopefully will touch 500 this financial year.
What are the new initiatives in the pipeline?
On the IT front, new products were launched last year. This year, we plan to roll out mobile wallet, digital branch (some time in December) and at least five products by the end of the current year.
How aggressive are you on gold loan?
We faced some problem last year because gold prices dipped. The advances were on the verge of becoming NPAs. The loan was much higher than the value of the underlying security. We tried roll over of loans by recovery of interest, giving some other loan (such as crop or personal loan) so that it could be covered, and finally took to selling auctioned jewels. All this led to a decline of ₹1,100 crore in the gold loan portfolio.
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