TIL Desk/Business/New Delhi/ State Bank of India on Monday ruled out a spike in bad loans following the mega merger that has catapulted the country’s largest lender into the top 50 globally with close to USD 500 billion balancesheet.
“Increase in NPAs is not necessary (post-merger) as associate banks had a number of accounts which were standard, but those were already NPAs with us. So, to that extent, those things have been put on the same platform,” Chairman Arundhati Bhattacharya told reporters here on Monday.
Effective April 1, the five associate banks — State Bank of Bikaner and Jaipur, State Bank of Hyderabad, State Bank of Mysore, State Bank of Patiala, State Bank of Travancore — as well as Bharatiya Mahila Bank have been merged with SBI, creating a global banking behemoth.
She said the bank has undertaken an asset quality review (AQR) on its own, apart from the one mandated by the Reserve Bank in December 2015, in respect of all the common accounts as part of the merger process. “All the stressed assets to the extent possible, where we had common exposures, are aligned now. We had taken more than INR 8,600 crore of additional provisions,” she added.
