HDFC targets Rs. 2b for housing loans

Anuradha KODAGODA

The HDFC targets Rs. 2 billion worth of housing loans for this year and planning for an expansion of branches during the next couple of months.

“Our main target was to improve the efficiency level of the Bank where we can compete with the private sector while providing a speedy service to the customer.

Therefore we went through a re-organizing process and cut down some of the areas which were not a value addition to the company. With all these amendments during last year, we were still capable enough to raise Rs. 1.4 billion for housing loans,” General Manager/Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Suresh Amerasekera said.

For the last financial year, HDFC has gone through a more consolidated year rather targeting on a huge growth rate in the market.

The main reason for that is the current interest and deposit rates are too high and it would not be attractive for housing loans. Therefore if we market the advances with aggressive interest rates, it won’t be favourable for the target market segments, since our main target is not the city population but the rural community,” he added.

This year HDFC is planning to go the extra mile by providing the ATM facility for the customers. We are at the moment negotiating with another commercial bank which has the wider ATM network in the country.

With this partnership HDFC’s customers would have easy access for their day-to-day money transactions irrespective of the area they live in.

We hope this would be a tremendous boost for our customers who lives around the country”.

“Even though there’s an economic rescission in the world, according to the Central Bank policies, so far we don’t foresee any threat for the banking sector in our country.

Being a Government sector bank, we offer loans mainly for the Government sector employees and our least target is the business community, Amerasekera added.

Our recovery rates are quite high, but there can be threat for some other industries such as apparel and other export and import industries which has the direct impact for their products. Sometimes there can be an impact of the increase of the price of construction raw materials.

The HDFC Bank has incorporated as a Building Society in 1984 and subsequently converted to a corporation in 1997.

The vision statement shows as to provide a package of attractive financial services for housing purposes through a competent and motivated team of employees using the state-of-the-art technology to maintain financial stability and growth of the organization whilst contributing to the national goal of providing decent housing to all.