SBI expects 14-15 per cent loan growth during the fiscal year 2024-25, the bank’s chairman Dinesh Kumar Khara said.

“Normally, we look at the GDP growth rate plus inflation and 2-3 per cent over that. That gives us around 14 per cent or so,” Khara told PTI.

“Hence, 14-15 per cent credit growth depends upon the opportunities available for lending, and it meets our risk appetite. We will be happy to grow at this pace,” he said.

As far as deposits are concerned, he said, it grew 11 per cent last year.

“And we have some elbow room available in terms of excess SLR which ensures that we don’t have any pressure on us to raise the deposit rates for supporting our loan-to-deposit ratio,” he said.

The bank has an excess Statutory Liquidity Ratio (SLR) between ₹3.5 lakh crore and ₹4 lakh crore.

“I may add here that our loan-to-deposit ratio is around 68-69 per cent only. That leaves enough room for us to lend without having pressure on the deposit interest rates.

Nevertheless, he said, “We always give importance to deposits. That is the reason why we increased the interest rate for the short-term deposits recently because we felt that there’s room for improvement ... we should improve our deposit growth rate to some extent during this year. And our effort would be that we should at least grow around 12-13 per cent this year.”

Last month, SBI hiked the fixed deposit rate on select short-term maturity up to 75 basis points. For retail term deposits of 46-179 days, the rate increased by 75 basis points to 5.50 per cent against the earlier 4.75 per cent.

On the net interest margin outlook for this fiscal, Khara said it would be around the same level recorded in FY24 or could be 2-3 basis points movement here or there.

PTI