SBI to focus on personal use after lending more than a trillion gold

State Bank of India SBI will focus on personal use after lending more than a trillion in that segment until June 2022, which will increase its focus on personal use.

The country's largest lender announced on Friday it would offer premium services for affluent clients, a new version of its YONO personal loan, and WhatsApp banking. It opened 31 central processing centres CPCs for urban and semi-urban centres for products like educational loans.

The chairman Dinesh Khara said that gold is seen as a preferred investment class during inflationary conditions. If gold is a preferred asset class, there will be more growth for the bank over the last year, and the bank saw much better growth for gold loans. He wouldn't give any comment on specific targets, citing regulatory restrictions ahead of the first quarter.

The gold credit is dispensed in two segments - agriculture and personal loans.

In FY 22 the bank's agriculture cold loan portfolio increased to Rs 73,601 crore from Rs 66,878 crore in FY 2021.

More than 2.4 million Agri amounting to Rs 37,500 crore were sanctioned by YONO Krishi by the end of FY 2022, according to bank's annual report for Fy 22.

The personal segment of gold was expanded by 9.89 per cent YoY to Rs 23,063 crore at the end of March 2022.

Khara said retail loans are an important engine for the company, as it has grown in the past. We expect that we will be able to avail of the growth potential. It will look at all the opportunities, be it corporate or SME. In Hyderabad and the Mumbai Metropolitan Circle, premium banking services will be offered on a pilot basis. After assessment, it would be scaled up nationwide. Khara said that the aim is to make emerging affluent clients customers of wealth banking services at an early stage. The assets under management wealth banking are over one trillion dollars.