The interest offered is mostly 0.5 to 1 per cent more than what other banks offer. Moreover, customer service and long-term association spanning generations are also other reasons for the popularity.
Only when the RBI inspection started on September 19 did they realise that their game was up and one of them had sent a letter to the central bank, leading to the RBI crackdown, report Anup Roy and Subrata Panda.
Business activity contracted in Q2 FY20, the first contraction since 2013-14 and the second since the 2008 global financial crisis, report, Abhishek Waghmare and Anup Roy.
Senior bankers are trying to impress upon the central bank that the shift to external benchmark-linked lending be postponed to April 1, 2020.
Payment aggregators should have a minimum net worth of Rs 100 crore and if they don't manage to arrange that money within one year of putting out final guidelines, they should stop doing their business, says central bank's draft paper.
The rise in bond yields would make it difficult for banks to pass on rate cuts as except for retail loans, most of their legacy portfolio are linked to marginal cost based lending rate, which takes into consideration bond yields.
Non-banking financial companies, that used to comprise at least 70 per cent of the issuance in the corporate bond market, are witnessing a credit freeze as investors shun bond issued by lower-rated firms.
The Malegam committee on the RBI's capital adequacy had suggested that the RBI must move away from its methodology to calculate the foreign exchange gains to a weighted average cost-based valuation method. Central bank may done away with provisioning requirements, to enable higher transfer of surplus in the 2017-18 fiscal, analysts say.
Banks are also weighing the option of hiring experts for help in specialised areas.
All public sector banks have moved to such a regime voluntarily, while private banks are yet to. The state-run banks have introduced repo-linked products for floating-rate home and auto loans, but the RBI said loans to micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) should also be linked to an external benchmark.
The Jan-Dhan accounts are zero balance accounts, comes with a life cover of Rs 30,000 per person, and an accidental cover of Rs 100,000. An active user of the account can also get overdraft facility of Rs 5,000 from banks.
The RBI governor's assurance should give investors enough confidence to start believing in the NBFC sector again, say bankers.
Reserve Bank of India Governor Shaktikanta Das tells Anup Roy, Raghu Mohan and Niraj Bhatt that it is time for banks to lower interest rates and start lending to cash-starved finance companies after due credit appraisal and proper risk assessment.
By no means do economists see the Reserve Bank of India stop at just a 25-bp cut. Some of the economists such as Soumyakanti Ghosh of State Bank of India are of the firm view that rates have room to fall by a total of 75 bps in the current financial year, starting with 25 bps in the August 7 policy.
Apart from easing the NPA pressure on domestic banks, the RBI's move can allow companies to raise cheap, long-term loans easily now.
Vodafone Idea, the promoter of Aditya Bira Idea Payments Bank, said in a notification to the exchanges late on Friday that the board of the bank approved winding up the business, subject to approval from the Reserve Bank of India.
The government planned to borrow 10-15 per cent of the total borrowing offshore. That works out to at least Rs 71,000 crore, or about $10.4 billion at Friday's exchange rate.
While the bond market is relatively conservative about their interest rate expectations, the currency market seems to be projecting that interest rates should be much sharper
Cox & Kings had a total debt of Rs 3,238 crore at end of FY19 and this included both short-term and long-term loans.
A lack of adequate disclosures raises the financing costs of corporate firms, especially sub-investment grade ones, and keeps the capital markets small, believes RBI deputy governor Viral Acharya.