Mumbai, May 12 (KNN) Bank of Baroda remained focussed more on stepping up credit to the retail and micro, small and medium enterprise (MSME) last year as it sought to re-balance its loan portfolio, bank Chairman and Managing Director, SS Mundra said adding that his bank is compliant with the regulatory targets when it comes to priority sector lending.
In an interview to Business Line, Mundra said that the Bank of Baroda has stepped up lending to the retail and micro, small and medium enterprise segments even as it shunned aggression on the corporate loans front.
The retail loan portfolio of the bank has grown almost 21 per cent (year-on-year) and MSME loan growth (after normalising for priority sector reclassification) was about 24-25 per cent.
“We did not want to be aggressive with corporate lending. The growth in this segment was less than what we have grown in the retail and MSME segments,” he said adding that the bank is compliant when it comes to priority sector lending.
Speaking about the experience with recoveries from bad loans, Mudra pointed out that the only way of strengthening recoveries is “follow-up, follow-up, and follow-up”.
“We strengthened our follow-up mechanism. We were always having a system of identifying weaknesses in loan accounts early. We put two General Managers in-charge of the recovery function and we got good results,” he said.
