Nevertheless, business specialists imagine that it’ll unlikely be a simple process for different SFBs to get common financial institution licence given tighter scrutiny by the RBI.
“SFBs ought to deal with Know Your Buyer (KYC) and cyber safety associated compliances points,” HR Khan, chairman, AU SFB instructed ET including that product and geographical diversification are crucial elements in securing a common banking licence.
Not like common banks, SFBs function underneath stricter capital necessities and have larger precedence sector lending obligations. They’re topic to a number of restrictions, akin to being unable to run non-banking monetary subsidiaries. They’re required to allocate 75% of their web advances to precedence sectors. For common banks this requirement is 40%.
The RBI additionally mandates that SFBs should have 50% of their mortgage portfolio comprised of low-ticket loans as much as ₹25 lakh. These restrictions can strain the SFBs’ asset high quality and profitability, typically resulting in larger gross non-performing property (NPA) ratios.
To use for a common license, the RBI rules stipulate that an SFB have to be listed, preserve a minimal web value of ₹1,000 crore, and have a gross NPA and web NPA of three% and 1% or decrease, respectively, for the previous two monetary years. They’re additionally required to take care of a capital adequacy ratio of 15% in contrast with 9% for scheduled banks.

