New Delhi: In a bid to deal with stress in NBFC sector, guidelines will be issued soon for state-owned banks to take over pooled assets of non-banking financial companies, a finance ministry official said.
“Both Department of Economic Affairs, and Financial Services are in consultation. The eligibility norms for takeover should be out this week or latest by next week,” the official said.
To address the stress in the sector, Union Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman in the Budget proposed that public sector banks would purchase high-rated pooled assets of financially sound NBFCs, amounting to a total of Rs 1 lakh crore during the current financial year.
For this, the Union government will provide one time six months’ partial credit guarantee to PSBs for first loss of up to 10 per cent.
The official further said the public sector banks would be allowed to pick up primarily ‘AAA’ rated assets where chances of delinquency is the lowest and big state-owned banks will be allowed to participate in this. Financially stressed bank PSU banks will, however, be kept out of its ambit.
It will help raise the balance sheet size of the participating banks and provide better-run NBFCs access to liquidity, the official said, adding most of the assets will be not of maturity over three years.
Soon after the Budget, the RBI too announced a special liquidity window which could potentially release Rs 1.3 lakh crore. The NBFC sector came under stress following series of default by group companies of IL&FS since September last year.
In a bid to improve regulatory oversight, the government also proposed to bring housing finance companies under the RBI from the fold of National Housing Bank. Sitharaman further said that these steps are aimed at improving the condition of the NBFC sector as a whole.
