Profectus Capital sees loan book at ₹4,500 crore this fiscal

livemint.com:

MUMBAI : Non-bank financier Profectus Capital, which lends to small businesses, wants to fund newer areas aligned to the government’s incentivized local manufacturing scheme and grow its book to ₹4,500 crore by end of this fiscal, chief executive officer K.V. Srinivasan said. Founded in 2017 by Srinivasan, who was earlier the chief executive of Reliance Commercial Finance, Profectus is backed by private equity firm Actis.

“We should cross ₹4,000-4,500 crore by the end of this financial year. Ultimately, by about FY26, we should touch ₹10,000 crore," Srinivasan said in an interview. Its loan book stood at ₹2,363 crore as on 30 June, up 47% from the same period last year.

The lender made a profit of ₹10 crore, on the back of ₹93 crore in revenues in the June quarter and its stage 3 ratio or bad loan ratio was at 1.53% in Q1 this year, up from 0.88% in Q1 of FY23. “All the investments that are required to make this happen, in terms of technology, processes, branches and people, are all in place. We have about 25 branches and I do not think we really need to go beyond that but need to add manpower at the operating level," said Srinivasan.

He said while the company will not look at hiring more senior executives, it will onboard people at the operating level in roles like sales managers. This, he said, would take the number of employees from 700 at present to 1,500 by FY26. At present, the company lends to small businesses across 11 industries but wants to expand its coverage gradually.

“Our ability to understand too many industries is limited and we did not want to spread ourselves too thin. We have chosen eight manufacturing and three services industries and are focussing only on that," he said. These include chemicals,