SBI With Chocolates And Home Visits As New Strategy For Loan Repayment (Image: x.com/@TheOfficialSBI)
The State Bank of India is now sending Chocolates, with home visits, as inducements to remind of loan repayments. The bank said that, this was yielding results in terms of success. This measure is being adopted as a part of boosting timely repayments, especially among the bank’s retail borrowers. This novel strategy is aimed at those customers who are usually at the defaulting line on the monthly payments due, the HT reported on this.
On this, SBI’s managing director in-charge of risk, compliance, and stressed assets, Ashwini Kumar Tewari said, “with two fintechs which use artificial intelligence, we are piloting a novel way of reminding our retail borrowers of their repayment obligations. While one is doing conciliation with borrowers, the other is alerting us on the propensity of a borrower to default. And to such borrowers who are likely to default, the representatives from this fintech will visit them, carrying a pack of chocolates for each of them, and remind them of the forthcoming EMIs.”
Mr. Tewari said that such a novel plan was being adopted because, the borrowers tended to ignore the calls once they had decided on defaulting. The adding of a personal touch by visiting their home, has brought in good rates of success.
Further, he said that the initiative was in its pilot phase, it has been only 15 days of implementing this and that the bank wanted to go ahead with this pilot phase to at least four to five months. On adding more force to the initiative, he said, “we are also talking to a few other fintechs to improve our collection efficiencies and hopefully by the end of the year, we will have formally tied up with at least half of them,” he said, adding that the bank wants to continue the pilot for at least four to five months.” He did not mention the names of the fintechs involved in this.
The banking system on a whole has a double-digit loan growth near to 16%, which is basically led by retail loans. SBI’s retail portfolio had gone up by 16.46% in the June 2023 quarter, to reach ₹12,04,279 crore. This was from ₹10,34,111 crore in the same period, last year. Retail loans are the largest assets for the banks, with a book of ₹33,03,731 crore which is growing at 13.9% YOY, the mint reported.
