Banking

Why Mis-selling By Banks ‘May’ Have Gone Up Post-Covid

The basic idea for almost everything I write emanates from some data point that tells me something. But this piece is slightly different and comes from the experiences of people around me and what I have been seeing on the social media.

I think with this limited anecdotal evidence and some data that I shall share later in the piece, it might be safe to say that mis-selling by banks post-covid may have gone up. Mis-selling can be defined as a situation where an individual goes to a bank wanting to do one thing, and ends up doing something else, thanks to the relationship/wealth manager’s advice.

The simplest and the most common example of this phenomenon is an individual going to a bank with the intention of putting his money in a fixed deposit and ends up buying some sort of an insurance policy or a pension plan.

Let me offer some evidence in favour of why I think the tendency to mis-sell post covid may have gone up.

1) Between March 27, around the time when the seriousness of the covid pandemic was first recognized in India, and October 9, the latest data available, the deposits of Indian banks have gone up by Rs 7.36 lakh crore or 5.4%.

Clearly, there has been a huge jump in bank deposits this year. To give a sense of proportion, the deposits between October 2016 and December 2016, when demonetisation happened, went up by Rs 6.37 lakh crore or 6.4%.

The increase in deposits post covid has been similar to the increase post demonetisation. Of course, the post-covid time frame has been longer.

What does this tell us? It tells us that people haven’t been spending. This is due to multiple reasons.

The spread of covid has prevented people from stepping out and there is only so much money that can be spent sitting at home (even with all the ecommerce). This has led to an accumulation of deposits. Further, people have lost jobs and seen their incomes crash. This has prevented spending or led to a cutdown. And most importantly, many people have seen their friends and family lose jobs. This has automatically led them to curtail their spending. All this has led to an increase in bank deposits.

2) Why do banks raise deposits? They raise deposits in order to be able to give them out as loans. Between March 27 and October 9, the total non-food credit given by banks contracted by Rs 38,552 crore or 0.4%. Banks give loans to the Food Corporation of India and other state procurement agencies to help them primarily buy rice and wheat directly from farmers. Once this lending is subtracted from the overall lending of banks what remains is the non-food credit.

What does this contraction in lending mean? It means that people and firms have been repaying their loans and not taking on fresh loans. On the whole, between March end and early October, banks haven’t given a single rupee of a new loan. This explains why interest rates on deposits have come down dramatically. Interest rates have also come down because of the Reserve Bank of India printing and pumping money into the financial system to drive down interest rates.

3) Using these data points, we can come to the conclusion that banks currently have an incentive to mis-sell more than in the past. Why? Banks currently have enough deposits. They don’t need more deposits, simply because on the whole, people and firms are not in the mood to borrow.

All this money that is not lent ends up getting invested primarily in government securities, where the returns aren’t very high. As of October 9, around 31.2% of total deposits were invested in government securities. This is the highest since July 2018.

The trouble is that banks cannot stop taking deposits even though they are unable to currently lend them. They can only disincentivise people through lower interest rates.

Or they can set the targets of relationship managers/wealth managers in a way where they need to channelise savings into products other than fixed deposits.

While banks have to pay an interest on fixed deposits, irrespective of whether they are able to lend them or not, they earn a commission on the sale of products like unit linked insurance plans, pension plans, mutual funds, portfolio management services, etc. This commission directly adds to the other income of the banks.

Basically, the way this incentive plays out explains why mis-seling by banks may have gone up post covid. Also, the risk of repaying a fixed deposit lies with the bank. The same is not true about the other products where the bank is just a seller and the risk is passed on.

What to do?

So, what should individuals do in a situation like this, is a question well worth asking? Let’s say you go to a bank to invest your money in a fixed deposit. As explained above, the bank really does not want your money in fixed deposit form.

The wealth managers/relationship managers will resort to the contrast effect while trying to persuade you to not put your money in fixed deposits. The interest rates on fixed deposits are very low currently. An average fixed deposit pays an interest of 5-5.5%. Clearly, once we take inflation and taxes on the interest on these deposits into account, the returns are in negative territory.

The relationship/wealth manager will contrast these low/negative returns with the possible returns from other products. His or her pitch will be that the returns will be higher in other cases. In the pitch, he or she will tell you that the returns from the other products are as good as guaranteed. A tax saving angle might also be sneaked in (for insurance products). (Of course, he or she will not present this in such a dull way. Typically, relationship/wealth managers tend to be MBAs, who can phaff at the speed of thought and leave you totally impressed despite their lack of understanding of things).

What’s the trouble with this? The returns in these other products are not fixed. In case of a fixed deposit the interest rate is fixed (which is why the word fixed is used in the first place). Now you might end up with a higher return on other products, but there is no guarantee to that. Also, sometimes the aim of investment is different. If you are putting your money in a fixed deposit, the aim might simply be return of capital than return on capital.

Further, the investment in these other products might be locked in for a long period of time, while you can break a fixed deposit at any point of time (of course you end up with lower returns). This is especially true for a tax saving investment.

To conclude, the next time you go to a bank, stick to what you want to do with your money and don’t fall prey to what the wealth/relationship manager wants you to do. Clearly, his and your incentives are not aligned. Also, if you can use internet banking to manage your money, that is do fixed deposits online, that’s the best way to go about it.

Corporates Will Continue to Default on Bank Loans

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We have extensively written about how corporate loan defaults have screwed up the state of banks in general in India, with public sector banks in particular.

This can be made out from the fact that the aggregate domestic corporate lending non-performing assets (or bad loans) of scheduled commercial banks, as of December 31, 2017, stood at Rs 6,63,877 crore. Bad loans are loans on which repayment has not been made for 90 days or more.

The total domestic bad loans of scheduled commercial banks on December 31, 2017, stood at Rs 8,31,141 crore. This means that the corporate bad loans account for 80% of the overall bad loans of banks.

Having said that, it doesn’t make much sense to paint all the corporates with the same brush. Borrowing is an essential part of corporate growth and that cannot suddenly go out of the equation.

Care Ratings has carried out a very interesting study on corporate borrowing and how the different kinds of borrowers (as per the total amount of borrowing) are placed in their ability to repay bank loans, at this point of time.

Care Ratings took a sample of 2,314 companies, which excludes banks and other finance companies. The total borrowing of these companies stands at Rs 20.02 lakh crore as of March 31, 2017.

The interest coverage ratio of these companies stood at 3.92. Interest coverage ratio is basically obtained by dividing operating profit of a company (or companies) by interest payments that need to be made on outstanding loans, during a particular period. This ratio fell to an almost similar 3.9 for the period April to December 2017.

This tells us that on the whole, the corporates are making enough money to keep servicing the interest that is due on their debt. But averages as usual hide the real story, which starts to change, as soon as we start to dig a little more.

Let’s look at this in detail one by one:

  1. For the period April to December 2017, 578 companies in the sample with an outstanding debt of Rs 4.78 lakh crore, which amounted to 24% of the total debt, had an interest coverage ratio (ICR) of less than 1. This basically means that companies which have taken on one fourth of the corporate debt (as per the sample used) are not earning enough money to keep servicing the interest payments on their debt.

    When the interest coverage ratio is less than one, the operating profit made by the company is less than the interest payment that is due. In such a situation, neither the company, nor the bank is left with many options. If the company’s situation does not improve, it is more than likely to default on the bank loan.

    How has the situation changed when we compare the financial year 2016-2017 with the period April to December 2017? In 2016-2017, 524 companies with total debt amounting to Rs 5.42 lakh crore, had an interest coverage ratio of less than 1.

    What this means is that in April to December 2017, more companies ended up with an interest coverage ratio of less than one. Nevertheless, a smaller amount of money was at stake.

  2. Let’s take a look at Table 1:

    Table 1: Distribution of companies and ICR according to debt sizeTable 1 makes for a very interesting reading. Let’s start with the large companies with a debt of Rs 5,000 crore or more. There are 68 such companies. Their interest coverage ratio has come down from 3.22 to 3.08. But this fall is not huge.

    Further, there are 23 companies with a total debt of Rs 2.82 lakh crore, with an interest coverage ratio of less than one. This basically means that large companies form a bulk of the debt of Rs 4.78 lakh crore of companies, with an interest coverage ratio of less than one.

    This basically means that the banks haven’t seen the last of corporate defaults and more defaults will happen in the time to come.

  3. The companies with a debt of Rs 2,500-5,000 crore are in the worst possible space. The interest coverage has fallen from 2.26 for 2016-2017 and to 1.73 during the period April to December 2017, respectively. Clearly the positon of these companies on their ability to keep paying interest on their debt has come down.

    There are 56 companies in this bracket. Of these 22 companies have an interest coverage ratio of less than one. These companies have a total debt of around Rs 75,000 crore. These companies (along with large companies with an interest coverage ratio of less than one) primarily operate in the steel, engineering and textiles sector. Take a look at Table 2.

    Table 2:

  4. Interestingly, companies with lower levels of debt seem to be better placed on the interest coverage ratio front.
  5. The study further shows that the companies with higher levels of outstanding debt have seen sharper declines in their interest coverage ratio during April to December 2017, in comparison to 2016-2017. As Madan Sabnavis and Rucha Ranadive, the authors of this report put it: “A combination of declining interest coverage ratio and interest coverage ratio less than 1 is a good signal to identify debt service failure.”

To conclude, what these data points tell us for sure is that the banks haven’t seen the last of corporate defaults. There is more to come.

This column originally appeared on Equitymaster on April 17, 2018.

89% of Bad Loans Written Off by Public Sector Banks are Not Recovered

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“You don’t get bored writing about bad loans of public sector banks?” asked a friend, a few days back.

We honestly told them, we don’t, simply because new details keep coming out, and we keep writing about them. And most of these new details show how messy the situation has become.

Yesterday, while digging through the questions raised by MPs in the Rajya Sabha, we came across another interesting data point, which again shows how messy the bad loans problem of public sector banks actually is and why it is not going to end anytime soon, irrespective of what analysts and politicians have to say about it.

Bad loans are essentially loans which have not been repaid for a period of 90 days or more.

After a point banks need to write-off bad loans. These are loans which banks are having a difficult time to recover.

When banks write-off bad loans, the total bad loans of the banks come down. At the same time, these bad loans are written-off against the operating profits of banks.

In an answer to a question raised in the Rajya Sabha, the government gave out the details of the total amount of bad loans which have been written off by public sector banks, over the last few years.

Take a look at Table 1:
Table 1:

YearLoans written off (in Rs Crore)
2014-201549,018.00
2015-201657,585.00
2016-201781,683.00
2017-2018*84,272.00
Total2,72,558.00
* Up to December 31, 2017

 

Source: RAJYA SABHA

UNSTARRED QUESTION NO: 3600

TO BE ANSWERED ON THE 27th MARCH, 2018

Table 1 tells us that between April 1, 2014 and December 31, 2017, the public sector banks wrote off loans worth Rs 2,72,558 crore. Hence, the profits of the bank have been impacted to that extent and so have the dividends that these banks give to the government every year.

Nevertheless, this is a point that we have made in the past. In this column, we hope to make a new point. While the loans that are written off are those that are deemed to be difficult to recover, there is still a certain chance that these loans may be recovered by the bank (given that loans are made against a collateral). How do the numbers stack up on this front? Take a look at Table 2.

Table 2:

YearLoans recovered(in Rs Crore)
2014-20155,461.00
2015-20168,096.00
2016-20178,680.00
2017-2018*7,106.00
Total29,343.00
* Up to December 31, 2017
 

Source: RAJYA SABHA

UNSTARRED QUESTION NO: 3600

TO BE ANSWERED ON THE 27th MARCH, 2018

 

From Table 1 and Table 2 we can conclude that over the last four years, Rs 29,343 crore of the bad loans that have been written off (Rs 2,72,558 crore) have been recovered by public sector banks. This basically means that the rate of recovery is 10.8%. Or 89.2% of the bad loans which are written off are not recovered.

Hence, technically there might be a difference between a write off and a waive off, but in real life, there isn’t. A write off is as good as a waive off with the banks failing to recover a bulk of the bad loans. Also, in case of a waive off, the government compensates banks to that extent.

As we have mentioned in the past, loans to industry amount to 73% of the overall bad loans of public sector banks, whereas loans to the services sector amounts to another 13%. This basically means that corporates are responsible for more than 80% of bad loans of banks. And this explains why public sector banks have a tough time trying to recovering the bad loans they have written off.

A bulk of these bad loans are because of corporates who have access to the best lawyers as well as politicians and banks find it difficult to recover these bad loans by selling the collateral against which these loans have been made.

While, public sector banks have written off loans worth Rs 2,72,558 crore over the last four years, the total bad loans outstanding of public sector banks stood at Rs Rs. 7,77,280 crore, as of December 31, 2017. So, public sector banks aren’t done writing off bad loans as yet. There is more to come.

Stay tuned!

The column was originally published on Equitymaster on April 3, 2018.

Let’s Move Beyond Nirav Modi, Bad Loans Are Bleeding India

Nirav_Modi
“Nirav Modi, Nirav Modi, where have you been?” is a question that the bankers at the Punjab National Bank (PNB), must be asking themselves these days.

Media reports suggest that Nirav Modi is in New York, and has no plans of coming back to India. His operational fraud is expected to cost PNB Rs 12,646 crore. PNB is the second largest public sector bank in the country and as of December 31, 2017, had accumulated bad loans of Rs 57,519 crore. A bad loan is a loan which hasn’t been repaid for a period of 90 days or more.

The one good thing that has happened since Nirav Modi’s fraud came to light is the relentless focus of the mainstream media on the operations of India’s government owned public sector banks.

The total bad loans of the public sector banks as of December 31, 2017, stood at Rs 7,77,280 crore. This forms 86.4% of the total bad loans of scheduled commercial banks (i.e. public sector banks + private sector banks + foreign banks).  This basically means that the total bad loans of scheduled commercial banks as of December 31, 2017, would be around Rs 9,00,000 crore.

Hence, Nirav Modi’s fraud of Rs 12,646 crore is just a drop in this ocean of bad loans. But his fraud has put a face to the sad state of affairs that prevails at public sector banks and has thus elicited interest from the mainstream media and the common public.

Before Nirav Modi came long, the bad loans of public sector banks was just an issue which with the business press was concerned about. Now even the TV channels in different languages are having discussions around the issue.

Nevertheless, the fundamental issue at the heart of the bad loans of India’s public sector banks continues to remain unaddressed. Who is responsible for this mess and what should be done about it?

The government released some interesting data earlier this month in an answer to a question raised in the Lok Sabha. As per data from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the total bad loans from the “industry-large” category of loans, as of December 31, 2017, stood at Rs 5,27,876 crore. This was for scheduled commercial banks as a whole. The RBI defines a large borrower as a borrower with whom the bank has an exposure of Rs 5 crore or more.

Such borrowers are essentially responsible for a bulk of the bad loans of the banks in India. They are responsible for around 59% of the bad loans (Rs 5,27,876 crore expressed as a percentage of Rs 9,00,000 crore) of scheduled commercial banks. Bank loans to large industrial borrowers formed 59% of the bad loans, even though the total lending by banks to such borrowers formed only around 30 per cent of the total loans given by banks.

Public sector banks accounted for Rs 4,64,253 crore or 88% of bad loans in this.
In fact, the much criticised public sector banks do a pretty decent job of lending to the retail sector. Take a look at Table 1, which basically compares proportion of retail loans which turn bad with proportion of loans to corporates which turn bad, for a few public sector banks.
Table 1:

Name of the bankRetail bad loans
( in %)		Corporate bad loans
(in %)
State Bank of India1.321.9
Bank of India2.627.6
Syndicate Bank416
Bank of Baroda3.416
IDBI Bank1.439.4
Central Bank of India4.623.5
Bank of Maharashtra4.415.3
Andhra Bank1.829.1
Source: Investor/Analyst presentations of banks.  

Table 1 clearly shows that corporate bad loans are much higher than retail bad loans. The question is why? The answer perhaps lies in what economists call regulatory capture. As Noble Prize winning French economist Jean Tirole writes in his book Economics for the Common Good: “The state often fails. There are many reasons for these failures. Regulatory capture is one of them. We are well aware of the friendships and mutual support that create complicity between a public body and those who are supposed to be regulating it.”

How does one interpret this in the Indian case? While it would be totally unfair to suggest that the RBI, which regulates banks in India, is pally with corporates, but it would be totally fair to say that Indian politicians are very pally with Indian corporates. This is where the problem for public sector banks in India lies.

While giving out retail loans, the managers running public sector banks, can make right lending decisions, the same cannot be said when they carry out corporate lending, given the political pressure that prevails on many occasions.

In this scenario, it is worth asking whether all the 21 public sector banks in India should actually carry out corporate lending and put public deposits at risk, over and over again? This is a discussion that we should now be having as a nation and the mainstream media is where this discussion should be happening.

The column originally appeared on The Quint on March 22, 2018

Let’s Say Thank You to Nirav Modi

Nirav_Modi

As of September 30, 2017, the total bad loans of Indian public sector banks stood at Rs 6,89,806 crore. A bad loan is a loan which hasn’t been repaid for a period of 90 days or more.

Nirav Modi’s fraud, as of today, will add another $2 billion (around Rs 13,000 crore assuming $1=Rs 65) to the overall bad loans of the public sector banks, assuming that the banks are unable to recover any amount. This doesn’t seem to be the case given that the government has moved quickly and attached many assets of Nirav Modi.
Long story short, Nirav Modi’s fraud isn’t going to add much to the overall bad loans of public sector banks. A percentage or two more, isn’t going to change the situation, which is grave, much. Given this, we have been wondering, why has Nirav Modi got Indians so worked up.

Over the last few days, everyone we have interacted with, from Kaali Peeli drivers, to other cab drivers, to guest house attendants, to journalism school students and faculty, to people who edit the different publications that we write for and even the guy who collects trash in the building where we live, have had a thing or two to say about Nirav Modi.

But Nirav Modi’s fraud of around Rs 13,000 crore is small change when compared to the bad loans of public sector banks of Rs 6,89,806 crore. Why haven’t we seen anyone talk about the overall bad loans of public sector banks, up until now? The defaults on corporate loans make up for around 69% of overall bad loans of public sector banks. Why hasn’t this disturbed people enough, up until now?

Or to put it simply, why have people now started talking about the fact that when they default an EMI on a retail loan, the bank comes after them with great speed and purpose, whereas businessmen like Nirav Modi are allowed to commit a huge fraud, and leave the country comfortably.

Why are businessmen defaulting on loans treated differently by banks than individuals defaulting on etail loans?

Why are there only sick companies and no sick businessmen?

What is it that explains this dichotomy? As Nobel Prize winning economist Jean Tirole writes in Economics for the Common Good: “Psychologists have identified our tendency to attach more importance to people whose faces we know than to other anonymous people.”

Take the case of the distressing picture of a three-year-old Syrian child, who was found dead on a Turkish beach in 2015. This forced Europe to pay attention to the refugees coming in from Syria.

As Tirole writes: “It had much more impact on Europeans’ awareness than the statistics about thousands of migrants who had already drowned in the Mediterranean.”

Or as Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator, once said: “The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of million men is a statistic.”

This phenomenon works in advertising as well. As Tirole writes: “An advertising campaign against drunk driving has a more powerful effect when it shows a passenger flying through a windshield than when it announces the annual number of victims (a statistic that provides, however, far more information about the consequences of drunk driving).”

As far as India goes, let’s take the case of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy which happened in December 1984. A bulk of English speaking and reading India woke up to the tragedy only once the India Today magazine put the picture of an unknown child being buried, in the aftermath of the tragedy, on its cover.

An issue really becomes an issue in the minds of people, once they can visualise it in terms of an individual. A good example of this in the Indian case is that of the anti-gutka campaign that was run a few years back, and which featured an individual named Mukesh Harane, who died of oral cancer in October 2009.

He was addicted to gutka. After his death he became the face of the anti-tobacco message which was delivered to the people of this country through an audio-visual clip (shown regularly in cinema halls) as well as a print campaign.  It showed Mukesh talking about the ill-effects of eating gutka, with a feeding pipe going into his nose.

It was a fairly disturbing video, but it really drove home, the ill-effects of chewing gutka.

Along similar lines, like Mukesh Harane, Nirav Modi has become the poster boy for corporate India looting the public sector banks, over the years. And given this, while the Rs 6,89,806 crore of bad loans did not make much of an impression in the minds of people (in fact very people would even be aware of the largeness of this number), Nirav Modi’s Rs 13,000 crore fraud, clearly has.

And nothing works better on the government than public pressure. The government has reacted quickly and seized the assets of Nirav Modi. It is also trying to push in long due reforms. Today’s edition of The Times of India reports that the government is planning a new regulator, called National Financial Reporting Authority(NFRA), to regulate the chartered accountants and auditors.

It will take away the review and disciplinary functions the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI). This is something which has been long due and only the Nirav Modi fraud has pushed the government towards considering this reform, seriously. The ICAI is a part of the deep state that runs India, and clearly needs to be reined in.

Further, banks have been directed to check for the possibility of fraud on all bad loans of Rs 50 crore or more. Many corporate defaults run into hundreds if not thousands of crore. The question is where did all this money that was raised to fund projects, go? Over the years, there has been a lot of talk about corporates overstating the cost of projects, borrowing a larger amount and then tunnelling money out of the project.

This is something that should have been investigated as soon as the defaults had started to happen. But, again, nothing was done on this front. Now thanks to Nirav Modi, this exercise has been initiated.

Above all this, the Nirav Modi fraud, raised enough stink, leading to the mass media writing, reporting and discussing about the mess that prevails in India’s public sector banks. A large section of the population came to know about the mess, only because of the Nirav Modi fraud. This wasn’t happening earlier. And this is very important in a democracy.

This has also led to analysts asking the government, as to why does it need to own 21 public sector banks. Or for that matter, should public sector banks be lending to corporates at all? Some sort of debate has been initiated on this front.

And for all this, in a very screwed up sort of way, we need to thank Nirav Modi.
The icing on the cake will be, if we are able to get Nirav Modi back to India, and the law of the land is allowed to catch up with him.

The column was originally published in Equitymaster on February 28, 2018.