PNB Housing Finance aims to grow business by 17% in FY25, the highest rate since 2019

PNB Housing Finance targets significant loan portfolio growth in FY25, driven by retail lending focus. The lender aims to balance affordable, emerging, and prime segments, with strategic branch distribution and varied interest rates for different loan types.
Atmadip Ray
  • Updated On May 4, 2024 at 09:23 AM IST
PNB Housing Finance plans to grow its loan portfolio by a minimum 17% in FY25, which would be the highest since 2019 as the lender is going full throttle on business expansion backed by comfortable capital position.

About 97% of its business is now retail lending including the affordable housing segment.

Managing director Girish Kousgi told ET that the lender is aiming to grow its retail book by 17% in FY25, while the overall loan growth is likely to be more when it resumes corporate lending.

Its overall loan assets grew by 10% year-on-year to Rs 65,358 crore at the end of FY24, while retail loans grew by 14%, the highest growth rate in the last five years. Its affordable housing loan book, which it started 15 months back, stood at Rs 1,790 crore.

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PNB Housing Finance's corporate loan book shrank 46% in FY24 to Rs 2,052 crore as it was on a balance sheet cleansing exercise.

The lender has also started a new vertical called ‘emerging market’ from April this year to cater to the retail segment in smaller cities with average loan ticket size of around Rs 25 lakh.

"We will have 50 branches in the emerging segment, which can give us a higher yield. So, our plan is to try and build the book from both affordable and emerging, which would contribute to about 40-42% of incremental business and the balance 58% would come from the prime segment," Kousgi told analysts in a post-earnings call.

"We are well capitalised and this will be good for the next two-and-a-half years, given our growth projections," Kousgi said.

The company raised Rs 2,494 crore through rights issue of shares in May last year, helping it to take its capital adequacy ratio to 29.3%.

The lender's net interest margin was lower at 3.65% in the fourth quarter to March 31, 2024 against 3.74% in the year-ago period, primarily due to shrinking of the corporate book. The lender is aiming to keep the NIM around 3.5% next year.

It has 300 branches, out of this 160 cater to the affordable home loan borrowers, 50 branches will be for the emerging segment and the balance 90 will cater to the prime segment.

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"In order to bring undivided focus on the retail segment, we ensured that we set up different verticals," the MD said.

The prime segment typically offers housing loans and loans against property through 90 branches in metro and tier 1 cities, with an average ticket size of 35 lacs and 9-10% rate of interest. The emerging markets business is aimed at capturing the high yielding segments in tier 2 and 3 cities. with an average rate of interest of 10-11%. The affordable housing segment offers housing and non-housing loans to customers, with an average loan of Rs 15 lacs and at 11-14% rate of interest.
  • Published On May 4, 2024 at 09:22 AM IST
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