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Laying more focus on the MSME segment, Indian Overseas Bank (IOB) will increase its lending to the sector from ₹31,000 crore at present to ₹50,000 crore in a couple of years from now, said a top official of the bank on Friday.
To focus on MSMEs, the bank has converted 250 branches, including 100 in Tamil Nadu, into MSME-centric branches, and has given training to 700 employees for the purpose, said IOB Managing Director and CEO Karnam Sekar.
Through its outreach programme, bank officials have been meeting industrialists in the sector to learn more about the problems being faced by them, he said.
After getting the suggestions, the feedback will be placed before the board of the bank to frame a policy to increase the MSME portfolio to ₹50,000 crore, which could be in one year to 24 months, said Sekar. On performance, the bank, which was in the red for the last four-and-a-half years, is hopeful of making profit in the fourth quarter of the current financial year, he said.
In the third quarter ended December 2019, IOB reported a net loss of ₹6,075 crore against a net loss of ₹346 crore in the corresponding quarter of the previous year, on account of higher provisioning of ₹6,664 crore, said Sekar.
Stating that gross NPA has come down to 17.12 per cent at the end of December against 23.76 per cent last fiscal, he said due to provision made during the quarter, the net NPA ratio improved to 5.81 per cent, which is less than the 6 per cent prescribed by the RBI
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