Banking News

DBS to complete retail offerings with super premium credit cards

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Mumbai: Singapore’s DBS Bank will look to complete its retail product offering by adding a super-premium credit card as soon as this week as it seeks to consolidate its position two-and-a-half years after acquiring Lakshmi Vilas Bank (LVB).

Prashant Joshi, head of consumer banking at DBS said credit cards will be added to the bank’s mortgage, personal loan and gold loan portfolios even as it runs down the legacy education and vehicle loan portfolios from LVB.

“On a monthly basis, we are adding ₹300 crore to ₹ 400 crore to our retail loan book, so we should be able to grow our book by 40% over the next 12 months which is of course on a low base. The wholesale book is roughly about two-thirds of our book and SME plus consumer is about one-third. This will invert in the next five years because consumer and SME will grow much faster and the intent is that these will become about 60% to 65% of our balance sheet over the next five years,” Joshi said.

The bank’s retail loan book is currently about ₹10,000 crore, which is roughly about 20% of the bank’s total advances of ₹50,000 crore. Almost half of retail is gold loans, followed by mortgages (20%) and unsecured (10%). The corporate loan book is about ₹35,000 crore while loans to SMEs are about ₹5,000 crore.

The bank already has a co-branded credit card with Bajaj Finance which has been in force for a year and about 229,000 outstanding cards, totalling about ₹350 crore to ₹400 crore. Later this week, it will introduce a super-premium Vantage Card aimed at high net-worth individuals (HNIs) who have invested more than ₹30 lakh through the DBS Wealth platform. Customers will have to pay a ₹50,000 annual fee to own this card.

The bank also will launch two other variants, a super-premium card for account holders with ₹1 lakh of bank account credits every month and a mass-affluent card for customers with a monthly credit of not less than ₹50,000.

Joshi said the bank aspires to improve its current and savings account deposits to 45% from 30% currently. “We have seen the advantages of a wider network. We introduced a minimum balance of ₹10,000 in November and though the average balance is the same, the quality of customers has improved. The fact that there is an assurance of a branch nearby has made a difference,” he said. The bank plans to add around 50 to 70 more branches to its 524-strong network in the next five years.

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