'Plan to double loan book size to '1.2-1.3 lakh crore by FY28'
Piramal Enterprises plans to double its loan book by FY28, with close to 70% of the portfolio comprising retail loans, said its chairman, Ajay Piramal. In an interview to ET's Deborshi Chaki, he said as part of the growth strategy, the company plans to reduce the ticket size of its wholesale book, lend to mid-sized corporates and exit its legacy wholesale book. Edited excerpts:
What is Piramal Finance 2.0 going to look like ?
In the lending business, the investments that we have made since the DHFL takeover in retail are both physical and technological. The growth will come significantly in retail through secured as well as unsecured lending. When we acquired DHFL, wholesale business comprised 95% and retail was 5% of our lending books. Today, as we speak, the bifurcation is 55% retail and 45% wholesale. Going forward, our stated objective is to have two-thirds retail and one-third wholesale. We are looking to double our book by FY28 to about '1.2-1.3 lakh crore. We call our legacy wholesale book Wholesale 1.0. The Wholesale 1.0 book in March 2022 was '43,000 crore, which has come down to '26,000 crore as of June 2023. At the same time, we are also creating a new wholesale book we call Wholesale 2.0.
How will the new loan book be different from the legacy book?
The new book is going to be very different from the old book. It will be much more granular, including the size of the loans that we will give out. Today the average loan size in real estate is only '165 crore and the average size of loan in corporate lending in mid-market is about '60 crore. Therefore, you can see the big difference. The second point is that the new book is not structured. It's all either based on interest and repayments that will be made under
