After decade of wilderness, Indian banking sector regain health but lack caution

By Andy Mukherjee

Indian banking sector spent most of the last decade out in the wilderness, as a punishment for the lax underwriting standards on their corporate loans. Now they have regained their health, restored profitability and reestablished investors’ trust. The benchmark Nifty Bank Index is close to an all-time high. With everything going well, the lenders should be turning cautious. But recent full-year results show an opposite trend: Provisions for future loan losses are beginning to decline. This may not be prudent.

Across most of Asia, muted big-ticket consumer expenditure — such as on housing — and restrained capital expenditure by firms have led to only a mild post-pandemic recovery in credit, which makes India’s double-digit loan growth a notable exception, according to economists at Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd. Just last month, New Delhi-based developer DLF Ltd. sold $1 billion worth of million-dollar homes on the outskirts of the national capital in 72 hours. A one-year, 29% jump in credit-card debt has made even the Reserve Bank of India, the regulator, a little uncomfortable. The central bank has cautioned lenders about the risk of delinquencies on their unsecured loans at meetings over at least the past three months, Reuters reported recently.

Yet, HDFC Bank Ltd. and ICICI Bank Ltd., two of the country’s largest lenders by market value, slashed their loss provisions for the financial year that ended in March by 23%. The money ICICI has set aside cumulatively is now 9 billion rupees ($122 million) less than a year ago. That isn’t a problem yet, because gross nonperforming assets have declined at a faster pace of 27 billion rupees. However, there’s nothing to suggest that they won’t rise again.

With the incremental credit-to-deposit ratio running at 111%, Indian banks will have to pay more to savers — sacrificing some part of their high profitability. Although even this won’t affect all lenders equally. Higher deposit costs “will tip the scale in favor of our rated banks, allowing them larger bargaining power to price the loans and hence to defend their margins,” according to Rebecca Tan, a senior analyst at Moody’s Investors Service. Problems may erupt elsewhere. “The key risk we are watching really is the quality of these bank loans to small-and-medium-sized enterprises and that’s predominantly because of the current rising rate environment,” she said in a Bloomberg TV interview last month.

Banks aren’t exactly oblivious to the danger. Excluding retail and rural lending, ICICI now has only 0.8% of its loan portfolio exposed to riskier firms rated BB or below. Two years ago, the figure was as high as 3.6%. Axis Bank Ltd., the fifth-largest lender, didn’t have to utilize its Covid-19-related loss cushion in the March quarter. As a result, even with a 64% drop in full-year provisions, it still has gross bad loans covered to the extent of 145%. However, all of this is backward looking. The retail loan book for both HDFC Bank and ICICI has grown by 1 trillion rupees apiece over the past 12 months. Axis saw almost a 900 billion rupee increase, while Bajaj Finance Ltd., a specialist nonbank lender to consumers and small firms, expanded its assets by about 500 billion rupees. Retail credit by just these four Indian lenders has expanded by almost the same amount in one year as the entire growth in the Thai banking system over the past four. And yet, Bajaj, too, has cut back on loss provisions by 34%.

Clearly, strong profit growth has put Indian financiers’ optimism in overdrive, but is it sustainable? The previous bout of unbridled enthusiasm for corporate lending ended with more than $200 billion in nonperforming assets, one of the world’s worst piles of bad loans. This time around, individuals’ data has replaced collateral of plants and machines. Digital lending is the new mantra. The belief seems to be that any lender whose portfolio of unsecured retail loans is not increasing by 50% annually is simply not trying hard enough.

But consumer demand is being led by a small pocket of affluence. The 6.5% growth in gross domestic product that the government is penciling in for the fiscal year that began this month faces several risks. Turmoil in the US banking industry is making India’s $245 billion software-export industry gloomy. A sustained rise in oil prices, currently kept in check by  global growth concerns, would crimp already-limited purchasing power of urban low- and middle-income workers amid high unemployment. Meanwhile, climate change could dash any hope of a recovery in stagnant real wages in rural areas. Summer temperatures are above normal by about 5 degrees Celsius (41 degrees Fahrenheit) in many parts of the country. Heat waves could damage crops and cause power shortages.