ICICI Bank Aims For A Home Loan Book Of Rs 2 Lakh Crore Within Two Years

ICICI Bank Ltd. today said its mortgage loan portfolio crossed the Rs 1.5-lakh crore milestone, making it the largest private player in the segment. Now it is eyeing the Rs 2 lakh crore mark by 2019-20.

“We are not only the largest private sector bank but also the largest mortgage player among our peers with a Rs 1.5-lakh crore loan book. And we hope to grow this to Rs 2 trillion, clipping annually at 15 percent by FY20,” said Anup Bagchi, executive director at ICICI Bank. The mortgage loan book is half of the bank's overall retail loan portfolio of around Rs 3 lakh crore, Bagchi added.

To achieve the projected Rs 2 lakh crore target over the next two years, the bank is also aggressively pushing its digitisation drive in the mortgage eco-system.

Under this, the bank has enabled developers to obtain approvals for their projects online, which seen the bank approving 2,000 new housing projects, fully online.

It has also enabled an online repository of 30,000 approved projects across 40 cities.

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Basing his optimism of clocking higher growth on the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojna, Bagchi said most of the growth is coming from tier II and III towns as the average ticket size slightly over Rs 30 lakh. He further said the bank doesn't need to worry about its bad loans, and without quantifying, claimed it to be one of the lowest in the industry. “In fact, our mortgage portfolio, which includes loan against property (LAP) also, is has very low credit cost.”

ICICI Bank will add 50 percent more loan processing centres from the present 1,050, Bagchi said. “We are expanding our network to many new locations in tier II and III towns as well as micro-markets on the periphery of the major metros and continue to leverage on technology to offer home loans in a fully digitised manner.”