State-run banks’ gross non-performing assets (GNPAs) from the credit card segment have doubled to 18 per cent at the end of FY23, Reserve Bank of India said on Wednesday.
It was about 9 per cent in the year-ago period and the same stood at around 15 per cent in September 2022, the central bank said in its biannual Financial Stability Report (FSR). The data release comes amid news reports stating that the RBI has been cautioning banks about the risks on unsecured books, which includes credit cards, personal loans, and microfinance. The FSR released on Wednesday said at an overall level, there was a marginal uptick in the NPAs in the credit card receivables category for the banking system in FY23 at 2 per cent.
Even as the state-run lenders showed heightened stress, private sector banks’ GNPAs from credit card receivables remained broadly flat at 1.9 per cent, while the same was 1.8 per cent for foreign banks. At an overall level, the banking system’s GNPAs fell to a 10-year-low of 3.9 per cent at the end of FY23, and are expected to improve further to 3.6 per cent by the end of FY24 under the baseline scenario, RBI said. Meanwhile, RBI said that high inflation coupled with a rise in borrowing costs adversely impacts the finances of households and their loan repayment capacity and stressed that this can have implications for lending banks.
Identifying different measures of risks using individual home loan data, it found that a twin shock in the form of a simultaneous increase in inflation and lending rates can put even households with sustainable repayment capacity at risk and double the loans at risk.
