Is it true that State Bank is betting big time on the home loans business to drive growth?

That is absolutely correct. India’s largest bank, SBI, is betting bit time on the home loans business to drive growth in the future. The bank has disclosed that in the last 10 years, SBI home loan portfolio has grown 7-fold from Rs.89,000 crore to Rs.500,000 crore in 2021. SBI now has plans to scale up the business further.

The plan as of now is to build the home loan portfolio to Rs.700,000 crore by the year 2024 and later scale it further in another few years to Rs.10 trillion eventually. This was also confirmed by the SBI chairman, Dinesh Khara. He specifically underlined that despite the pressure applied on the realty sector by the pandemic, the home loan business had grown very sharply and had virtually driven the retail book of SBI in last few years.

According to Dinesh Khara, SBI has been investing its time and management bandwidth to simultaneously integrate the digital initiatives into home loans business. The banks is also currently customizing the offerings to individual customers to make it more meaningful to the unique needs of home loan borrowers.

In fact, SBI has just developed and tested its RLMS or Retail Loan Management System. This platform provides end-to-end digital solution for home loan customers from prospecting to advice to selection of properties to documentation to funding. In the previous quarter, SBI had already emerged as India’s largest player in the home loans segment. SBI is also looking at the co-lending model specifically for targeting the unorganised sector in semi urban areas.