Piramal Capital aims to increase retail loan book to more than Rs 1 trn

Piramal Capital & Housing Finance expects to grow its retail loan book to more than Rs 1 lakh crore over the next three years from around Rs 25,000 crore now.

The company, part of Piramal Enterprises, has been rebranded as Piramal Finance.

It is into housing finance, SME lending, retail finance along with wholesale lending, which is the mainstay with over Rs 42,000 crore in developer financing. Its retail book stood at Rs 24,872 crore at the end of the September quarter.

Out of the retail book, as much as 63 per cent is affordable housing loans and most of it came from the takeover of DHFL in September 2021.

Around 26 per cent is secured MSME loans, 4.2 per cent is digital finance, 2.6 per cent is unsecured MSME book and 1.3 per cent is used car loans.

The microfinance book which the company started last September forms 3 per cent of the loan book and the recently launched personal loans is about 0.2 per cent, the company's Managing Director Jairam Sridharan told PTI on Wednesday.

Sridharan expects to bring down the quantum of the housing loans to the total loan book to around 50 per cent over the next two-three years.

"We closed Q2 with a loan book of Rs 24,872 crore on completion of one year of merger with DHFL. We want to grow this to over Rs 1 lakh crore over the next three years, two-third of which should be retail book," Sridharan said.

To address the financing needs of the unserved/underserved markets, the company will be focusing more on small towns, primarily the micro-markets on the outskirts of large cities, he said.

Over the next five years, the company plans to almost double its branches to 600 in small towns from the present 343 branches across 293 cities spanning 27 states.

According to Sridharan, the company, which began 12 years ago, has been focused on the Western states but will now shift the focus first to the South and then to the North and later to the East.

Piramal Finance, which is the new brand name for the group's credit business, serves over 2.2 million customers, 0.45 million of them acquired in the second quarter of the fiscal when its loan sales jumped over 40 per cent.