'SBI Card to enrol delinquent customers in restructuring plans'

New Delhi: SBI Card is in the process of enrolling "delinquent" customers, who did not repay after the end of moratorium, in the RBI restructuring scheme or its own repayment plan to provide them more time for repayments, a top company official said.

Due to the moratorium, a number of customers had not been paying for the first three months and the company treated them as standard accounts in line with the entire industry. However, since then, as the first moratorium ended, SBI Card made it a customer-led enrolment in the second moratorium in which a lot of customers did not enrol, SBI Card Managing Director & CEO Ashwini Kumar Tewari said.

"Therefore, we had a large chunk of customers who came out of the moratorium. A lot of them paid up but many of them did not pay also. And these became what we call as more delinquent customers.

"So with these delinquent customers, we are now working to enrol them either into the RBI restructuring scheme or our own repayment plans so that they get more time and better interest rate to pay their dues," Tewari, who took charge over a month ago, he said.

According to the company, it had Rs 7,083 crore under moratorium in May which came down to Rs 1,500 crore in June.

Those who would be availing the company's restructuring plan will have a benefit over the RBI restructuring plan as SBI Card will not report such cases to the credit scoring agency CIBIL. In March, the RBI had allowed the first three-month moratorium on payment of all term loans due between March 1, 2020 and May 31, 2020. Later on, it was extended for another three months till August 2020.

The process of restructuring is going on currently, Tewari said, adding a large number of accounts are to be enrolled and the company needs to make a 10 per cent provisioning on these accounts as per the RBI guidelines.

Besides, there are some accounts that surely have become NPA due to the pandemic and therefore additional provisions need to be created for that, he said. "However, we will be very cautious, even if we get to that number (provisioning), we would still like to provide more because the future is still uncertain," he added.