‘We want to partner banks to gain foothold in home loans’

livemint.com:

CreditAccess Grameen Ltd is seeking to diversify its asset base by increasing the share of its non-microfinance book through housing, unsecured business and gold loans. After being elevated as chief executive officer in August, Ganesh Narayanan is looking to raise the share of non-microfinance loans from the current 1% to 12-14% in 4-5 years. The lender will also look to increase its share in housing loans by adopting a co-lending model to tie up with banks.

Edited excerpts: Given the nature of the business and history, this is something people ask us wherever we go. I think the sector is in an exciting phase. You are seeing large names enter this sector because of the consistent performance of the sector despite multiple events and regulatory changes.

In the medium term, the sector will do extremely well but it is too early to take calls on how things are moving. There will always be small incidents, here and there, but we do not see any pockets of specific stress now. There was a temporary issue when there were rains in certain pockets last month but it has normalized now.

Those things keep happening, and I do not see anything major coming up. CA Grameen always maintained that microfinance will be the key focus. With a penetration level of 35-38%, there is enough headroom to focus on microfinance and that is why, for the medium term, we will continue to be an NBFC-MFI.

We have customers who now have higher income levels, but we are losing a certain percentage of customers to competitors for some products. For microfinance, we want to continue to introduce new products that customers need. Today, we do unsecured business loans, mortgages (loan against property), and will launch affordable home loans this financial year.