Private Banks under our coverage are expected to report flattish profits sequentially, largely due to absence of recoveries from written-off accounts and absence of treasury gains in Q4FY19e. However, on a y-o-y basis pre-provisioning profit growth is likely to be healthy at 21% y-o-y for private banks and 7% y-o-y for SBI led by pressure on fees.
Loans & margins: While loan growth is seeing a healthy pick-up for both private banks and SBI, the latter is likely to see greater traction in margin improvement given comfortable funding costs. Private banks are likely to see some benefits of MCLR repricing coming through despite hikes in deposit rates. We do not foresee any stress on margins due to additional 10% Liquidity Coverage Ratio (LCR) requirements from Jan’19 as all banks under our coverage have an LCR of above 100% as of Dec’18.
Volatility in yields may lead to lower treasury gains: The 10-year GSec yield is unlikely to translate into bumper treasury gains that we saw in Q3FY19.
Asset quality and credit cost likely to improve: We expect banks under our coverage to report improvement in asset quality as we expect the trend of slowing slippages to continue. We also expect credit cost to be stable/slightly improving for our coverage banks even as we remain watchful on Axis and YES Bank given their recent CEO change. Even as IL&FS is likely to remain standard in the books of banks, we expect that they may take additional provisioning on this account.