Catholic Syrian Bank to go slow on home loans

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Chennai, Oct 20 : Catholic Syrian Bank (CSB) will be cautious on lending to housing sector due to risks involved in the real estate sector. The bank will go slow on the home loans, said R Venkatraman, Chairman and CEO of the bank.

Venkatraman, who was here on Monday to announce a tie up with Laser Soft Infosystems Ltd, for core banking solutions (CBS) across all its brand network, said: "We have to be cautious on housing loans due to risks involved in the Indian real estate sector. We will go slow on this segment. However, we continue to focus on priority sector, corporates and other retail areas."

"CSB is a small bank and has no exposure on derivatives as well as international markets and our CD ratio is pegged at 63.43%, he added.

"Our priority sector lending is 42%, followed by agriculture (18%), corporate lending (16%) and retail portfolio. Out of the retail portfolio, housing is small portion for us", he said.

"We are targeting a total business of Rs 10,000 crore as of December-end as against Rs 8,600 crore last year. Out of which deposits will be around Rs 6,600 crore while the advances will be of Rs 3,400 crore," he said further.

To a question, he said the bank is planning to come out with a rights issue in the ratio of 1:1. The bank hopes to come out with the same in the near future.

Currently, the capital base of the bank is Rs 16 crore (1.6 crore of shares of Rs 10 each) and the bank plans to raise Rs 115 crore to increase its capital base further, expansion of branch/ATMs network and improved lending, he said.

The bank has 362 branches now and has applied for launching 40 branches with equal number of ATMs (onsite). "We expect to get the approval from RBI before year-end," he added.