Home Loan Portfolio Crosses Rs 9-Lakh-Crore Milestone: SBI Chairman

SBI Chairman C S Setty said the bank's mortgage loan portfolio has crossed Rs 9 lakh crore last month and expressed optimism that the momentum in the RAM segment will drive 14% overall credit growth during the current fiscal year.

Retail, Agriculture and MSME segment, which is 67% of the total loan portfolio, has also crossed Rs 25 lakh crore milestone in September.

With the improvement in economic growth, SBI upped its credit growth target from earlier 12% to 14% for the ongoing financial year.

"We increased guidance on credit growth. We have revised it from 12 per cent to 14%. We see a robust credit growth, particularly from the RAM segment, MSME is almost growing at 17-18% and agriculture and retail is around 14%," he told PTI in an interview.

Besides, he said, the bank is witnessing good growth in gold loan while express credit, which is unsecured personal loan, will have double-digit growth.

Corporate credit, which had been slow for some time, saw a turnaround with 7.1% growth during the second quarter.

"Our guidance on the corporate credit would be in lower double digit, which means that overall, 12-14% credit growth rate seems to be achievable," he said.

The Reserve Bank's decision to further slash the key policy rate by 25 basis points would make loans cheaper and drive demand for fresh credit.

Setty, the chairman of the country's biggest lender, had expressed confidence of achieving its 3% net interest margin guidance even despite RBI's 0.25% repo rate cut in the December policy.

Last week, the Reserve Bank of India lowered the repurchase, or repo rate, by 25 basis points to 5.25% and retained a neutral stance, which gave room for further rate cuts. The rate cut came after a gap of six months with a view to further bolster growth which hit six quarter high of 8.2% in second quarter of fiscal 2026.

The SBI chairman also said the bank may not need equity capital to drive credit growth and maintain a capital adequacy ratio of 15 per cent over 5-6 years.

'Even before this QIP was raised, our ability to fund credit growth has never been a problem. We wanted to strengthen the capital ratios, so we have. Our long-term strategy is to maintain CRAR at 15 per cent and Common Equity Tier 1 at 12 per cent,' the chairman said.

This kind of Capital to Risk Asset Ratio (CRAR) gives the bank the ability to fund advances over Rs 12 lakh crore, Setty said.

'With a profit rate like what we have today, if the same profitability is maintained for another five to six years, we may not require any capital raising, at least on the CET 1 part,' he said.