Ladies and gentlemen, good day, and welcome to the L&T Finance Holdings Limited Q3 FY24 earnings conference call. As a reminder, all participant lines will be in the listen-only mode, and there will be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the presentation concludes. Should you need assistance during the call, please signal an operator by pressing star then zero on your touchtone phone. Please note that this conference is being recorded. We have with us today, Mr. Sudipta Roy, the newly appointed Managing Director and CEO, Mr. Sachinn Joshi, Chief Financial Officer, and other members of the senior management team. Before we proceed, as a standard disclaimer, no unpublished price-sensitive information will be shared during the call. Only publicly available documents will be referred to for discussions during interaction in the call.
While all efforts will be made to ensure that no unpublished price-sensitive information will be shared, in case of any inadvertent disclosure, the same would, in any case, form part of the recording of the call. Further, some of the statements made on today's call may be forward-looking in nature. A note to this effect is provided in the Q3 results presentation sent out to all of you earlier. I would now like to invite Mr. Sudipta Roy to share his thoughts on the company's performance and the strategy of the company going forward. Thank you, and over to you, sir.
Thank you. Very good morning to all of you. Before we start the call, I'd like to wish you all a very happy and a prosperous New Year on behalf of the entire leadership team at L&T Finance. I feel humbled to take over as the MD and CEO of this organization that has been nurtured by Mr. Dinanath Dubhashi for the last eight years as MD and CEO, and I would like to thank, thank Mr. Dubhashi for his significant contribution in transforming L&T Finance into a truly digitally powered retail NBFC, straddling the rural and urban ecosystem in the country. I'd like to start this call by sharing our satisfaction about our quarter three FY 2024 performance with all of you.
I'm happy to share that once again, we have registered the highest ever quarterly disbursement, maintained expected margins, and further reduced credit costs, thereby achieving a PAT of INR 640 crore. That translates into a 41% growth year-on-year. In line with what we have been communicating over the last few quarters, we continue to achieve and exceed the Lakshya 2026 targets well ahead of time and deliver consistent results quarter-on-quarter. This is an outcome of the strong execution engine that we have put in place over the last couple of years, and we will continue to bolster the execution bias in every initiative we take. Today's call is divided into two sections, which will be sequentially taken by myself and our CFO, Mr. Sachinn Joshi.
Before getting into further details and presenting the highlights for the quarter, I would like to draw your attention to the 5-Pillars of execution that we had detailed in our last analyst call, namely, enhancing customer acquisition, sharpening credit underwriting, implementing a futuristic digital architecture, heightened brand visibility, and lastly, capability building. Over the course of the call, I will also speak about how we are further building our strengths across the 5-Pillars of execution to create a sustainable and predictable retail franchise, and Mr. Joshi will be talking about the overall business metrics and financial performance at length. With that, let me start with the highlights of the quarter and the strategic roadmap for L&T Finance going forward.
As far as the global economy is concerned, majority of global forecasters expect global growth to remain range-bound or to slow further in 2024 on the back of persistently high interest rates, escalation of geopolitical conflicts, sluggish international trade, and climate-linked issues. The Indian economy will continue to remain as a bright spot in this environment, with economic growth holding firm amid improved macro-financial stability. In fact, some of the leading rating agencies have forecasted India's average growth rate to be in the range of 6.5%-6.7% till about FY 2027. During the quarter, a festival-led uptick in production across non-agricultural indicators and sustained deflation in commodity prices improved the overall production growth in Q3. Consumption sentiment remains stable among high-income groups.
As far as the outlook on Indian agriculture scenario is concerned, it is expected to record somewhat of a muted growth of approximately 1.8% in FY 2024, owing to elevated temperatures and patchy monsoon on account of the El Niño phenomena. We are hopeful of a recovery in Q1 FY 2025 on the back of an expected increase in rural outlay by the government. On the policy rate change front, we expect the magnitude and timing of a policy rate change to be data dependent and carefully calibrated in line with the inflation trajectory of the Indian economy. To conclude, the macroeconomic prospects for India appear to have brightened with a few caveats. However, we'll continue to track the progress granularly, as we always do in the coming months, and take business decisions judiciously. We achieved a very important milestone for the organization this quarter.
The subsidiaries of L&T Finance Holdings Limited, namely L&T Finance, L&T Infra Credit, and L&T Mutual Fund Trustees, were merged into LTFH. With this merger, all the lending businesses have been housed under one entity, LTFH, with it becoming the equity-listed operating lending entity. Going forward, this single operational lending entity will be renamed as L&T Finance Limited, subject to the receipt of applicable statutory and regulatory approvals. I'm happy to share that the merger was completed well before the envisaged timeframe, with all the necessary approvals in place. The single entity will lead to seamless corporate governance, increased operational efficiencies, and synergies in treasury and liquidity management. With the wholesale book going below the threshold level of 10% of the overall book size, time has now come to focus on our consolidated numbers going forward to monitor our journey ahead till FY 2026.
Going forward, we will only publish one consolidated financial performance summary of the entity in our financial reporting and investor presentation. Now I'll talk about the quarter three, FY 2024 highlights. Undoubtedly, the biggest and the most important highlight for this quarter is that we have achieved all our Lakshya 2026 targets in FY 2024 itself, almost two years in advance. Our Lakshya 2026 plan was to establish L&T Finance into a leading, digitally enabled, customer-centric retail fintech at scale. We set four qualitative targets, and let's evaluate our performance against those goals in quarter three, FY 2024. The first milestone was achieving a retailization of greater than 80%. Against that, retailization stands at 91% at the end of this quarter, and we expect to maintain this positive trajectory going forward. The retail book growth target was set at a CAGR of 25%.
Against this, we grew at 31% year-on-year this quarter, and this growth has been consistent. Thirdly, the retailization thrust had to be credit calibrated, with a growth of retail GS3 below 3% and NS3 below 1%. We're happy to inform that the retail asset quality metrics are well within the Lakshya 2026 targets in this quarter, with GS3 at 2.95% and NS3 at 0.64%. The fourth and the last milestone of achieving a retail ROE of 2.8%-3% was already achieved in quarter one this financial year, 3.08% in quarter one and 3.32% in quarter two.
This quarter, it has further improved to 3.37%, and while we will only present consolidated numbers going forward, we thought that this is an important metric for this quarter to share with you in our journey of delivering on the Lakshya 2026 objectives. Our persistent focus on execution, and execution alone, has made this performance possible. We were able to achieve this thanks to the relentless efforts demonstrated by each and every colleague of L&T Finance, and we all remain committed to a consistent performance trajectory going forward. On the investor call for quarter two, FY 2024, I had communicated in detail about the five vectors or pillars of execution for ensuring growth in a linear and sustained manner. I would like to give a brief update on what we have done across the 5-Pillars. First, Customer Acquisition.
We are constantly focusing on broadening our customer funnel and working on both horizontal expansion and vertical penetration across all lines of our business. For instance, in Rural Group Loans and Microfinance, on one hand, we are working on activating new villages where we do not have presence in the geographies that we operate in. We are also parallelly working around vertically increasing the depth of our business in those villages where we already carry out our businesses. Acquisition strategies like this across products has resulted in disbursements to about 6.9 lakh new customers in Q3 FY 2024, against 6.5 lakh new customers in quarter two, FY 2024. Sharpening credit underwriting. We had talked about developing a dynamic credit engine that not only ingests bureau data, but also other alternate database trust signals.
We have started the journey of building this new credit engine, and we will keep updating you on the progress as we move forward. On the digital part, we have worked on revamping our digital journeys for Home Loan product and SME products, and are focusing on various platforms for these products for a smooth customer experience. As far as the PLANET App is concerned, we are leveraging the channel multifold by using it not only as a new customer acquisition platform, but also for our repeat business, collections, and most importantly, the servicing needs of our customers. Brand visibility has been an area on which we have been working in the past quarter. An array of marketing initiatives were undertaken in quarter three, FY 2024.
We conducted product-specific marketing campaigns, for example, the multi-city festival awareness campaigns for rural finance and wall branding campaigns in rural geographies for our Rural Businesses. We also did an organization-wide marketing through brand awareness campaigns on Disney+ Hotstar for Asia Cup and World Cup cricket tournaments, print ads in leading newspapers, and developing customer testimonial videos and participation at industry-specific events like RE Motoverse or Homethon, et cetera. On capability building, we remain focused on our capability building agenda. A purpose to that, our newly created position of Chief Marketing Officer has been filled, and we have strengthened the leadership bench below the business chief executives by adding experienced new leaders at key positions across major business lines.
We also have added a seasoned technology professional as our new Chief Digital Officer, and further expect to announce significant new hires in our digital and technology teams and other verticals shortly. Going forward, the strategy would be to make our performance consistent, predictable and sustainable. It would revolve around sharpening or relaunching our existing product propositions and introducing contiguous product lines, with a sharp focus on broadening our customer acquisition funnels, while also harvesting our existing customer database of over INR 2.2 crore customers. We constantly strive to reimagine and redraw various customer digital journeys to provide a superlative experience to our customers, sharpen our credit underwriting by bringing in new age insights into the underwriting models, while constantly strengthening brand L&T Finance and building new capabilities in the organizations, both traditional and new age.
Now let me talk about the business strength that we have steadily built in the last few years. A diligently cultivated franchise is not a one-time activity, but an ongoing effort that requires significant thought and strategy, put in place with the help of digital and data analytics. The optimum mix of a strong physical presence and preferred channel partners, coupled with leveraging our database of 2.2 crore plus customers, of which about 1.5 crore are rural and about 0.75 crore urban, we are putting in place a superior retail franchise capable of addressing evolving and ever-changing needs of the retail customer.
While we disbursed about 6.9 lakh new customers during the quarter, our active franchise stands at about 93 lakh customers currently, in comparison to the disbursement of about 6.5 lakh new customers the previous quarter, and an active customer base of 90 lakhs in the previous quarter. Share of cross-sell as well as upsell in total disbursements stands at 36% in this quarter. The consistency of improvement in customer franchise numbers underscores the enduring strength of the franchise that our organization holds, and we are proud to witness its continued success as a testament to our ongoing commitment and focus. Building a fintech at scale is not about disbursing loans digitally, say, through an app or a website.
The essence of building a fintech in its truest sense is using tech heavily in each and every aspect of every line of business. This has been our way of offering a one-stop solution to our customers. We not only prioritize the acquisition of new customers digitally, but also ensure long-term association, satisfaction, loyalty, and sustained value realization as they navigate their financial interactions with us through our digital platforms. We have strived to use digitally, not only in the lending or collection side of the business, but also internally, when our systems interact with each other. To ensure that this particular trajectory is maintained, we are investing more and more to make this part of our ecosystem continuously responsive to our customer needs.
Also, if we talk about digital finance delivery capabilities, we had highlighted earlier how we are developing digital finance delivery as a key customer value proposition. Apart from building 100% paperless journeys in Rural Business Finance, Farmer Finance, Two-Wheeler, and Personal Loans, we are also boosting our digital collection capabilities. In urban space, 94% of our urban collections happen completely digitally. We also, when we talk about rural collections, especially in the Rural Group Loans and Microfinance and Farmer Finance, 19% of their collections were carried out digitally this quarter. Needless to say, efforts are on to increase this number gradually, with increased awareness and adoption by our rural customers. Our D2C PLANET App will be completing two years, one month from now.
Our plan of initially offering features addressing basic customer servicing needs, while we are now adding superior engagement feature that has worked wonders, given tangible results. We have built autonomous journeys for our products, Personal Loan, Two-Wheeler loan, Rural Group Loans, Microfinance, and Farm top-up, and the app has crossed about 7.6 million downloads till date. With multiple servicing and engaging features already in place, we are in the process of adding more features to the app. A few journeys went live this quarter, and we are expecting conversions from those journeys in the coming months. Again, superior risk management, aided by data accessibility and availability of tech tools, is also an ongoing attempt. Your work is happening on multiple fronts in order to create a digital fortress with a best-in-class infrastructure.
We are talking about a dynamic and a self-learning underwriting engine that we have already talked about previously. We are in the process of building it, and we will talk about it more in the coming quarters, as and when we are in a position to deploy the new engine into production. The last point I will talk about is ESG. As one of the first NBFCs to embrace sustainability, our journey of creating a positive impact for the society started quite a while back. Consequently, L&T Finance has partnered with SABERA, which is Social and Business Enterprise Responsible Awards, as a digital sustainable NBFC partner to recognize best practices in ESG and sustainable development initiatives by corporates, nonprofits, and individuals.
We also won the award for the Best Sustainable Initiative in Women Empowerment at the second India Sustainability Conference and Awards for the digital tech project, among many other notable achievements. In conclusion, I would like to thank Mr. S. N. Subrahmanyan, the Chairman of L&T Finance Holdings Limited, for entrusting me with this responsibility to lead L&T Finance in its next growth phase. I would also like to thank Mr. Dinanath Dubhashi for his immense contribution for building L&T Finance into the organization it is today, and also for facilitating the leadership transition in such a textbook fashion. Additionally, I would like to thank the investor community for reposing their faith in us over the years, and we will endeavor to meet their expectation to the best of our abilities. Now I will hand over to Mr. Sachinn Joshi to take you through the financial updates for the quarter.
Thank you. Thank you, Sudipta, for the detailed highlights and your vision for L&T Finance. So let me begin with, retail performance first. Retail NIM plus fee, as we have seen over the last few quarters, has remained strong at 12.08%. We made again, one more high, highest ever quarterly retail disbursement, INR 14,531 crore, up 25% year-over-year. Our retail book has closed, you know, a new milestone, very about to be reached of INR 75,000 crore. We were INR 74,759 crore, up 31% year-on-year. Our, you know, ROAs, as Sudipta mentioned earlier, retail ROAs stand at 3.37%.
In Q2, it was 3.32, so directionally going up... As far as asset quality is concerned, retail GS3 and NS3, we stand at 2.95% and 0.64% respectively. So in this case also, the goal of having GS3 less than 3% and NS3 less than 1%, completely achieved in this quarter. On the consolidated performance, our tax for the quarter is INR 640 crore, you know, it is up 41% year-on-year. Capital adequacy continues to remain strong, at 24.93%. On the consolidated side, consolidated NIM plus fee remains strong at 10.93%, again, improving both sequentially and on a year-on-year basis.
GS3 and NS3 at a consolidated level also have been directionally going down, 3.21% and 0.81% respectively. Our credit cost has reduced on a YoY basis from 2.67% in Q3, FY 2023 to 2.52% in Q3, FY 2024. Continued with our, you know, accelerated reduction in wholesale book with a steep reduction of INR 24,405 crore. It's down 78% year-on-year basis, and now the wholesale book stands at INR 7,020 crore, 7,020 crore at the end of Q3 FY 2024. One more piece to highlight is that the profit before tax on a year-on-year basis is up 31% at INR 824 crore. Previous year, the same amount was INR 632 crore.
Over the past two years, since the launch of Lakshya 2026 strategy, we have always guided that our wholesale book will keep reducing gradually as per plan. The ROA at consolidated level will keep moving towards and converge with the retail ROA. In line with this, after having achieved Lakshya 2026 goals two years in advance, we now set the bar higher to achieve Lakshya 2026 goals at a consolidated level. With that aside, let me now quickly take a deep dive and give some specific updates. The Retail Businesses first. Disbursement, retail disbursements in Q3, FY 2024 stood at INR 14,531 crore, 25% higher on a YoY basis.
This has resulted in the retail book growing by 8% quarter-on-quarter, so sequential growth also we have seen, and as well as on a YoY basis, which is up 31%. Our overall retail mix has grown to 91%. It is up from 64% in Q3 FY 2023, and 88% in Q2 FY 2024. On the Rural Business Finance, the business has registered disbursements of close to INR 5,500 crore, and the book size has crossed INR 23,000 crore milestone in this, at the end of the third quarter. The monthly disbursements run rate has been maintained at about INR 1,800 crore, despite the festival period, which is considered to be a weak quarter, especially for this period. Farmer Finance, the disbursement stood at INR 2,027 crore.
You know, previous quarter it was INR 1,534 crore. Now, this increase of INR 2,000 crore disbursement has led to a book size growing to INR 13,845 crore. On a YoY basis, it's an 11% increase that we have seen, and this is in spite of the fact that the industry has seen a degrowth of 5% during this quarter. On the urban finance, the segment which comprises of Two-Wheeler, Personal Loans, Home Loans, LAPs, also saw 18% YoY jump in the overall disbursements. This has led to a increase of 29% year-on-year on the, as far as the overall urban book is concerned. To start with, I'll talk about Two-Wheeler.
The Two-Wheeler business has registered highest ever disbursements of INR 2,530 crore in the quarter, up from INR 1,817 crore in the previous quarter. The Two-Wheeler book also has crossed 10,000 crore milestone. It's close to INR 10,500 crore. The book has grown 20% year-on-year. Personal Loan this business witnessed disbursements of about INR 850 crore. Previous quarter, it was INR 1,300 crore, and the book size stood at close to INR 6,500 crore. The book overall has increased 36% year-on-year. On Retail Housing, it achieved highest ever quarterly disbursements close to about INR 2,000 crore. It is up 67% year-on-year. In the previous quarter, the same figure was INR 1,700 crore. Book size with this increased disbursements stands at INR 16,650 crore.
It's an increase of about 33% on a year-on-year basis. Talking about SME Finance, it was launched in Q3 FY 2022. It's completed two years this quarter. Our Q3 FY 2024 disbursements stood at INR 965 crore. The month of December 2023 also registered highest ever disbursements. We did INR 380 crore in this quarter in this month. In line with our strategy of maintaining optimal geo mix, we have launched 56 new locations in November, thereby taking the total location count to 109. On the collection front, in fact, there is a slide that we, you know, have as part of our investor presentation. Our retail products experienced top-notch collections again in this quarter. You know, they are actually displayed along with stage-wise book for our retail products, which can be referred to by everyone.
On the wholesale book, we continued our accelerated reduction in the wholesale book with a steep YoY reduction of INR 24,400 crore. The book is down 78% year-on-year basis and quarter-on-quarter, the reduction is close to INR 2,300 crore, it's down 25%. With this reduction, the wholesale book now stands at INR 7,020 crore at the end of third quarter. I thank all of you for a patient hearing. We may open up for questions. Thank you.
Thank you very much. We will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask questions may press star and one on their touchtone telephone. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Participants are requested to use handsets while asking questions. Ladies and gentlemen, we will wait for a moment while the question queue assembles. The first question is from the line of Digant Haria, from Green Edge Wealth. Please go ahead.
Yeah, hi. Congrats, Sudipta, on, you know, getting elevated to the position of MD. My question is, let's see, in the last three to four quarters, you know, our credit costs in the Retail Business have been hovering around, you know, that INR 500 crore number or 3%, you know, around 3%, kind of a number. Do you think we have some more scope to reduce this number? Because, you know, if I individually look at, you know, how the CV, you know, how the tractor cycle is or the Microfinance or the Two-Wheeler cycle is, you know, it seems that, you know, there can be some improvement in this number going ahead. Any thoughts on this, Sudipta?
Yeah. So if you see, Digant. Thank you. First, you know, thank you for your wishes. And if I look at the overall credit cost on our Retail Business, you know, it's actually from on a percentage terms, it has been trending downwards. If you look at, you know, our credit cost for quarter to FY 2024 was about 2.74%, which is actually sequentially reduced to 2.61% this particular quarter. But, you know, I do believe that credit cost is a particular line in which you can always do more work, and that is where, you know, we have been saying, and if you sort of refer to back to my 5-Pillars of execution, the second pillar is reducing, continuously reducing credit costs.
So we are actually investing heavily in this particular vertical, in sort of building a next-gen credit engine. And the through-the-door acquisition, what the portfolio that we will go forward and our existing portfolio, we will use this new credit engine sort of to normalize and try to see if we can further reduce costs, either maybe making collections sharper or the through-the-door sort of the volume that comes in, it comes in with a far better credit quality. So this is a continuing exercise, and we remain focused on that. So we remain hopeful that, you know, this particular sort of process has been set in motion. And on an overall basis also, we are trying to sort of trend the portfolio towards a little more towards prime.
For example, in Two-Wheelers also, we're focusing on large amount of prime through-the-door acquisition, while making sure that while we are focusing on prime through-the-door acquisition, and by prime, I mean prime by bureau definition, which is bureau score 750+ or asset sizes of about INR 1.5 lakhs worth of vehicles. You know, while we are taking our overall numbers up, we are also trying to make sure that, you know, our overall prime penetration also goes up. So it's a mix of a couple of things. You know, it's a mix of making sure that our credit engines are tighter, using technology and a new generation, sort of credit engine to administer credit, but also directionally push our distribution channels towards more prime in some of our lines of business, while continually strengthening our collections practices.
I do believe that, you know, this is - this will remain a work in progress, and we'll continuously strive to make our credit cost sort of trend downwards.
Got it. Got it. Great! Thanks, Sudipta, for this answer. So second follow-up to this is, let's see, you know, if we, you know, move towards a better customer segment and a better credit engine both, then do we, would we have some room to change our collection strategy as well? Because I think currently we do have a lot of physical collection infrastructure also, and, you know, maybe those cash to eNACH kind of conversions may still be happening within the organization. So, you know, can there be some cost benefits also, which come later on, you know, once more and more portfolio is towards this newer customer segment and newer credit engine?
Absolutely. You know, the one of the six couple of axes on which we are working, apart from working on a new credit engine, the other thrust has been improving our digital collection capabilities. Because both of these go hand in hand in reducing the ultimate collection cost. And with the penetration of digital payments in the country, we are seeing very healthy trends, especially from rural areas of customers who were hitherto used to paying in cash for many years, are actually moving to sort of pay digitally. So, those sort of efforts remain. You know, for example, we have been focusing very strongly on making sure, especially in a business like tractor, our eNACH penetration percentages on our through-the-door acquisitions go up with every month.
Similarly, there's a large focus on our Rural Business customers to make sure that we introduce to them the methods of paying digitally and focus on doing that. In fact, if you see, in Urban Business, 94% of our collections are currently digital. In our Rural Business, about 19% of our collections are digital. So this remains a progress area, and we are keeping on pushing on it. But also, what we have to keep in mind that on-ground collection strength is very, very important because, you know, we remain in a environment where, you know, economic shocks or a localized event might happen at any point in time. We have to remain vigilant of that. So a good amount of collections presence is always a prudent strategy to maintain continuously.
So it will be an optimization of the right optimum collections presence on ground, as well as a continued focus on improving digital collections. So we will keep on working on both these fronts.
All right, all right. Just on the rural collections, you said 19% are digital. Like, you know, what to what extent can this number go? Like, can it go as high as 50, 60, 70% also in the setup that we have and the setup that India is into?
See, I think this is something which we have seen gradually with every passing quarter, the uptick is there. You know, you have to understand that the major hurdle of your digital collections is basically the smartphone penetration. Because smartphone penetration and, you know, there is. When we travel around, you know, we see that there's still a significant difference in smartphone penetration between the southern states as well as the northeastern states, especially like UP and Bihar, the smartphone penetration, especially among the women folk who are borrowing on the Rural Business Finance vertical, you know, the smartphone penetration is less. But every, sort of, every quarter, this particular number is ticking upwards. So I won't hazard a guess as to by what time you will get to about a 50%-60%, you know, sort of level.
But, I think we will get there sooner than later.
Perfect. All right. Thank you so much, and all the best.
Thank you so much, Digant.
Thank you. The next question is from Hardik Shah from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Hello, sir, and congratulations on the quarter. Am I audible?
Yes, you're audible.
Yes. My question is on the Personal Loans. I see lower disbursements in the quarter. Anything to read there? And has the pricing changed post the RBI announcement of increased risk weight?
Okay. So on Personal Loans, you know, what we have—what we are trying to build on Personal Loans is that, you know. Yeah, I would agree that there has been a pause. I would sort of define it as a pause in Personal Loans disbursement this quarter compared to the previous quarter, is because we have been sort of optimizing some of our customer journeys. We have been sharpening the credit funnel, but also we have been implementing some of the regulatory, sort of, items like Video KYC, et cetera. So, directionally, the number is less because many changes were happening on the funnel, and we were also great sharpening the funnel for our next growth, sort of, trajectory.
So, this is, as I would say, this is a temporary reorientation pause rather than anything else, and we will continue our growth trajectory starting this quarter.
Has the pricing changed on the—
Yeah. The next part of the question, you know, as of now, you know, if you look at our cost of funds overall, you know, they are quite stable. You know, between the last quarter and this quarter, it has only gone up by about 2 basis points. However, you know, because of the RBI guideline on RWA increase, et cetera, we expect that, you know, our cost of funds, there will be some impact on our cost of funds. But our guesstimate is that it will be a difference, the difference will be in the range of 10-12 basis points, over the next, 12-month timeframe.
And also, I would like to also say is that, you know, especially, you know, on our Personal Loans business, you know, the credit quality remains good, and, you know, the collection sort of parameters that we have seen, especially in remains excellent. And we really were not in that BNPL space, et cetera. So we were in prime Personal Loans, and of the normal Personal Loans ticket sizes, and we have used this quarter to sharpen the funnel and improve the digital journeys of this particular line of business.
Understood. So second question is on the credit costs. How do you expect that to trend from here on? And in the event of credit costs going upwards from here on, how comfortable are you dipping into provisions, and what is your strategy on overall PCR?
See, overall, we have given a guidance that our OpEx plus credit costs will range within a 7% sort of, sort of guidance. So we remain committed to that particular guidance. As I sort of explained, in my answer to Digant , that our whole focus is on building a sort of next-gen credit risk engine, and we are being very extremely careful and conservative as we scale up our business.
So, you know, given the fact of the investments that we are doing in our credit risk engine and trying to build a new next-gen framework, properly test it, make sure that, you know, our collections teams are capacitized, and we use data more and more in our collections teams, and overall, our shift towards prime in certain lines of business, you know, we remain quite confident that we will be able to navigate within that 7% credit cost of OpEx guidance that we have given going forward.
Okay. Thank you, sir.
Thank you so much.
Thank you. The next question is from Avinash Singh, from Emkay Global. Please go ahead.
Yeah, hi. Good morning. Congrats to you too. Couple of questions. Again, one, a bit again, repetitive on credit costs. So I mean, you operate into the segments of, like, almost 2/3 of the books are in the segment and the Rural, Micro, Two-Wheeler or Farmer Finance that is perceived to be kind of a cyclical and have a slightly higher, credit cost. So even giving in for that, okay, you are building a mortgage book and that will be like close to 1/3 or 1/4. Your 2/3 or 3/4 of business is going to be in a segment that will be cyclical and slightly riskier. So, and so you have to be, sort of a peak over the cycle, kind of a provisioning cost in mind.
In that context, I mean, Yeah. Do you see the current, sort of a credit cost, being an outcome of benign cycle or you are comfortable, that this, kind of, you know, credit cost anywhere around 2.5%-2.7% for the retail, is going to be comfortable over the cycle? So, that is one. And then follow-up would be more on sort of, some data keeping question. If you can provide some breakup of, this quarter's credit cost in terms of, standard sector provisioning, NPA provisioning, as well as what is the sort of amount of, write-offs. And secondly, if you can provide, you know, at a console level, what's the Stage 2 asset?
Because I can see that, for retail, another call, so I get a Stage 3, but not a Stage 2. Thanks.
Yeah. So now I'll take your first question, sir. So you need to understand that, yeah, and I'll take your first question to the fact that, you know, yes, we agree that, you know, we are in businesses that are rural in nature. But what we also have to understand is that we have a decade-long experience in managing these businesses. And sort of the cumulative learning that the organization has, especially in all the states that we operate in. And at a village level, at a block level, at a taluka level, we know how the risk operates, in that we have a ten-year history of that particular geography. And you know, our... And the fact is that our collections discipline is very, very strong.
If you look at our collections efficiency charts, you know, for example, in our RBF businesses, we operate a collection efficiency, zero-defective collection efficiency, 99.7%-99.8% in most markets. So that way, you know, between our understanding of the market, between our collections efficiency, and again, because of the experience, our credit engines are also designed in a way to underwrite those customers. If you look at our approval rates, for example, in our RBF businesses, right? You know, for every 100 customers applying, we only approve 45. We have approximately 45% approval rates. So that way, the through the door funnel is also very, very tight. And also we have a very strong credit monitoring as well as portfolio management practices.
So yes, you know, there is sort of, at times, the thought that, you know, in this business you might have some localized event risk, right? But for that, you know, we also have INR 200 crore of macro provisions, which has been kept aside to deal with any of the sort of, localized risks that might arise in the business. But I'll again go back to what I answered in the previous two questions, is that though we have expertise, though we have a large track record, we are not resting on those laurels.
We are trying to build a next-gen credit risk engine for across all our lines of business, which will help us sort of to predict this risk better and sort of see even beforehand, even if, you know, and be sort of responsive to any sort of very minute leading risk indicators of sort of risk humanity. Our teams are continuously on the ground. Our risk management teams are continuously on the ground, traveling from location to location, trying to figure out whether there is any sort of semblance of risk that we might not be comfortable with emerging. We immediately take action thereafter if we see any such sort of incidents or any hotspots are developing. So it's a dynamic exercise, and we are continuously as an organization, focused on it.
So, we are confident that, as I said, you know, in the previous answer, that, you know, we have a guidance of cent percent risk cost to OpEx trajectory, and we will try to sort of operate and navigate within that. With regards to your second question, I think we've given detailed stage-wise declarations in the analyst deck. Which page is it? Sorry, which is-
That is not for console.
It's 19.
No, that's just for retail. I was asking console at Stage 2.
So as of now, we have given for retail, right? But actually, you know, console doesn't make sense because, you know, retail is what ultimately we are-
91% retail now.
The, uh...
Okay. And if you can just sort of provide credit cost breakup in terms of a standard sector provisioning, write-offs and, you know, NPA for the quarter?
No, we don't provide that on the calls. But rest assured that, you know, with what Sudipta just mentioned, the overall credit cost, you know, quarter-on-quarter basis, we have seen the trajectory coming down. And number two, the macro potential provisions, which are currently on micro loans, there is also an internal discussions that as we start growing in the retail space, we would possibly like to create this only full unsecured book as we progress into the future quarters. So there will be sufficient, you know, conservatism that we have maintained till now, and which we will continue with, as we progress.
Okay. If you can just sort of tell what is the sort of Security Receipts that will be outstanding currently? And what kind of timeline you would have, sort of, by the time, I mean, the Security Receipts will be resolved or fully, I mean, whatever, paid out or resolved?
There is no additional impact this quarter. There has been only resolution which has happened. About INR 420 crore of assets have got resolved from the overall security receipt value. It stands about INR 7,900 crore, roughly.
Okay. This will likely be resolved in next two years? I mean, because currently, they might be leading to a cost of maybe INR 120-INR 125 crore annually. I mean, on that SRNCD fees.
As mentioned in the previous call also, you know, all these cases are in various stages of NCLT, and we believe that in next, maybe 15-24 months-
Yeah.
We will start seeing it coming down. In fact, this is the first quarter when we already seen a resolution of INR 420 crore. And, you know, depending on each case, where it stands, we will start seeing resolution.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. Before we take the next question, we'd like to request participants to please limit your questions to two per participant. For follow-up questions, you may rejoin the queue. We take the next question from the line of Abhijit Tibrewal from Motilal Oswal. Please go ahead.
Yeah, good afternoon, everyone. One, two questions really. First one is a follow-up on the SR question that you answered. So you said, SRs on the balance sheet are about INR 7,900 crore. These are the gross values of the SRs which are represented, or these are net SRs on the balance sheet?
Okay, let me just summarize this, for you. If we, if we look at the overall, asset book that, you know, if you look at what was the original ERE at the time of sale, the overall book was about INR 19,000-odd crore, out of which about INR 4,000 crore has been received in cash, which, you know, and the provisions have been made to the extent of about INR 7,000-odd crore. So roughly, INR 15,000 crore was the book, you know, excluding the cash that was received, and on which INR 7,300 crore of provisions have been made. So broadly, if you take that, the, the book that we have currently, it's about 40% of the original value.
60% have been either received, money received in cash or provided for already, as it stands today. This has been fair valued.
Okay. And like you said, I mean, this is expected to get resolved within the next 15-18 months?
That's right. If you recall, last year, same time in Q3, we had also, you know, fair valued the whole asset book, and at that point of time, we had mentioned that whatever provisioning is required on the full wholesale book, will be taken care of through the, you know, reduction in the, fair valuation, which was done. We don't expect any, incremental hits coming to the P&L for resolution of loans on the book or off the books, which are in the form of SR.
Got it. Thank you. And sir, my last question is for Sudipta, sir. So firstly, again, congratulations for taking up officially taking up the role of MD, CEO of this franchise. I just wanted to understand, since July to now, I mean, from what we understand, I mean, you travel very extensively, and you've been looking very deeply at all the Retail Businesses that we have. We have a very wide product suite across Microfinance, Two-Wheelers, Tractors, Consumer Personal Loans, Home Loans. So, I mean, which businesses, I mean, have you identified are maybe relatively weaker than the other senior product portfolio and will require some overhaul, either from an underwriting or a collection perspective?
I would not say that any business is weaker or anything like that. You know, there are businesses which are mature businesses, and there are businesses which are developing businesses. There are businesses which are in the progress of scaling to the next level. You know, I think we... One of the realization that I have had, you know, after, sort of immersing myself deeply in all lines of business, is that we have excellent people, right? Both in business and connections in all our lines of business, right? What, what we need to do from hereafter is, as I said, you know, sharpen, you know, our credit underwriting, sharpen our digital funnels, and making sure that the focus on new customer acquisition, as well as cross-selling on our existing franchise, is, is that discipline is, is maintained, you know?
So, and while we give them air power of brand, brand, brand marketing, et cetera, you know, we give them the air cover of that. So that is what, you know, we have been putting the ball into motion in the last six months. And as I can see, it is gaining momentum across all the full organization, across all lines of business. So, and you will see us moving the needle forward, going forward, quarter on quarter.
Got it, sir. And maybe in the interest of time, just one last question, maybe follow up on something you've already answered on Personal Loans. So I mean, what we saw in this quarter in Personal Loans is only, I mean, temporary or transitory, because this quarter, the disbursements were a seven-quarter low. But like you suggested, I mean, you've been kind of spending more time in this business, whether it be becoming regulatory compliant or kind of sharpening your credit funding. So, I mean, going forward, we should again see you kind of resume the growth trajectory in consumer loans as well?
Absolutely. So in Personal Loans, this quarter, as I would call a reorientation/cross quarter to make our system stronger, both from a business credit as well as a regulatory standpoint, and also the customer experience standpoint on our digital funnels, right? So, we already have resumed the growth trajectory, and you will, you will see the, this business moving forward, in, in the coming quarter. And I would say in a risk-calibrated fashion. This is very, very important. This is something that we will not compromise on, right? So we will grow this business in a risk-calibrated fashion.
Got it, sir. This is very, very useful. Thank you so much, and wish you and your team the very best.
Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is from Mahrukh Adajania from Nuvama. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi, congratulations, Sudipta, sir. I had a few questions. On housing, first of all, so if you see most lenders who are into prime and above that ticket size lending, have not seen any housing loan growth. So what are you competing for in housing? What would your average ticket size be, first of all? And I mean, how competitive are your rates relative to others?
So Mahrukh, average ticket size for housing is between INR 60 lakh-INR 65 lakh, which puts it almost in the prime category of housing loans. So, on housing, we are focused as of now, you know, in two lines of obviously in two lines of business. One is, you know, business generated, either through our builder tie-ups, et cetera. And the second thing is that where we go through our channel partners or our channel team either digitally generates or, or, or through leads that we get organically. So that is, you know, sort of... But we are focused on as of now in the prime and the near prime segment in, in housing loans. And, we are, and as we have said, you know, this is a line of business which we intend to grow, going forward.
And because this also provides a very large volume of low-risk balance to entire, entire, retail book. In terms of our rates, because if you look at our cost of funds profile, you know, we are able to sort of compete in the prime space with our width there, and sort of our rates are more or less comparable to most of the other banks or some of the leading NBFCs. So that way, we're able to compete. If you see our top-line numbers, our top-line numbers are growing in a healthy fashion in this particular business quarter on quarter, and we remain focused on this business, and we are hopeful that over the next couple of quarters, we'll be able to grow this business even more strongly.
Yeah, because overall, the sector is not seeing much growth. That is the reason why I was asking.
Yeah, so you know, the fact is that, there is good amount of healthy sort of end user demand, which we are seeing in some markets. But again, you know, if you look at our overall book size, our overall book size is not very significant as of now. So objective for us now is to more sharply define our product proposition, make sure that our digital journeys are absolutely top-notch, and our servicing capabilities in this particular line of business are further improved. So our focus right now is to grow this business to a reasonable amount of scale, while we optimize, you know, the digital delivery, we optimize the product proposition, and as we optimize the service channel. Right? So that is what we are focused right now.
The amount of demand which is there in the market is sufficient for us to grow.
Got it. My next question is, so you have kind of tightened the credit filters on Personal Loans with a temporary pause. You also mentioned something on regulatory compliance, which I didn't understand fully, but I'll come to that a bit later. But do you see yourself doing that in any of the other businesses? And I specifically ask on MFI, where your collections, rural and MFI put together, where your collections are still monthly, whereas most players are on a much lower collection schedule, and some of them are tightening. Those who are on monthly, like Spandana, are trying to progress to, you know, faster or quicker, shorter duration collection, so.
So Mahrukh, I'll take your first question on Personal Loans first, in the sense that, you know, on the. Let me sort of clarify on the regulatory thing. You know, the fact is that, see, it's not any-- so Video KYC, we are actually implementing Video KYC. So Video KYC is obviously an RBI's acceptable method of doing customer KYC. So that entire Video KYC stack actually had to be built and pushed into the system and then optimized, right? So that is-- that was the only thing that I mentioned from, you know, it's not that, you know, we are not compliant or anything like that. We are adding an additional KYC, digital KYC methodology, which is moving to 100% digital Video KYC right now. So there is no physical collection, et cetera.
So customers who come online or customers who are sort of, even through our partner channels, if any customer comes, the only method of KYC is Video KYC. So that is the only thing that we have sort of, added in our personal business. In terms of, Microfinance business, you know, if you see our collection efficiencies are very strong and our collection cycle are actually from the first to twelfth of the month. So, you know, the first 12 days of the month is spent on collections. So that way, we are almost spending almost half of the month in collections. Other lenders, you know, they follow different practices, fortnightly practices, weekly practices, et cetera.
We do believe that sort of front-ending the collections effort towards the beginning of the month, gives us a lot of freedom to focus on business generation in the latter part of the month. So this is a model that we have been running for many, many years now, and it works really well. As you can see, you know, we have collection efficiencies of 99.7%-99.8% in most of the markets. So this is working well for us, and we intend to continue it.
Got it, and just one clarification. So by how much have your Personal Loan disbursement rates moved up by? You said that your cost of funds has increased 10, 12 basis points, you've been indicating that since the RBI circular. But so, your cost, your yield on Personal Loan would have moved up by what range? Unsecured, I mean, sorry.
Yeah. So if you see YoY, it's about a quarter to FY... Sorry, yeah, 1%. It's moved about 1%, right? Yeah.
Yeah. No. Okay. No, I meant new disbursements post the RBI circular.
See, as of now, our cost of funds, et cetera, has been moved back significantly. It's been only a two basis points movement. So if your question is whether we have gone and repriced our Personal Loans?
Yes.
As of now, we have not repriced our Personal Loans as of now, because the increase in cost of funds quarter-on-quarter for us has been about two basis points. But going forward, yes, we will reprice.
Okay, so that increase will be 30-35 basis points? How much will it be? That's what I'm-
That is something that we will decide on the course of doing business. That is something which, unfortunately, I cannot give a guidance on the call. And so it's dependent on multiple maturity of factors. It's dependent on how the market has responded, it dependent on how our competitors have moved their rates upwards, and, you know, what is our sort of estimation of how much the conversion funnel will drop if I take the rate of our particular level. So it's one of the... And you know, fact is that right now, the rate is dependent also on the bureau score, right? If you have a, you know, higher bureau score, you know, your rate is lower. If you have a slightly... You know, so most of our Personal Loans funnel operates on a risk-based funnel. So it's not one uniform rate all over.
But yes, you know, if our overall input cost of funds goes up, our overall stock through the door, inward stock should see a rising rate, and that we will decide maybe over the next couple of months, right? And then when we know the, we, we have a visibility of how our cost of funds is moving.
Okay, thank you so much. Thanks a lot.
Thanks, madam.
Thank you. The next question is from Kunal Shah, from Citigroup. Please go ahead.
Congratulations, Sudipta. So firstly, when we look at it in terms of yields, so in fact, yields have moved up quarter-on-quarter. So one would be obviously the mix shift towards retail. But if you look at it in terms of the AUM growth, this quarter, largely the AUM growth is led by the lesser yielding loans. So where in terms of Home Loans, where SME acquired portfolio. So then, what is leading to this kind of an increase? Has there been any rate pass-ons in any of the segments which you would have seen?
So you see, most of our, most of our businesses have had a good disbursement trajectory over the last two quarters, you know. Our Rural Business Finance business has had a strong disbursement trajectory over the last two quarters. Our SME business. Plus also, you know, obviously, first, obviously, contributing is a change in retail mix. We are now 91%. So as and when we are becoming more retail, you know, you will have higher, higher yields. But also, within our retail mix, also our Rural Business Finance vertical has been doing quite well, and there have been strong and robust disbursements over the last two quarters. You know, our Two-Wheeler business has been doing well, and there has been strong disbursement over the last. Again, this quarter has been quite good, as we have put it in the past PP.
It was quite good for Two-Wheelers. So overall, you know, the buoyancy in disbursement and the buoyancy in disbursement of some of our higher-yielding products, as well as the change in retail mix, is overall contributing to the movement upwards of the yield.
Okay. Okay. And, secondly, if you can reconfirm, wholesale, right? Should it be again, the loss of INR 20-odd crore and retail being there at INR 660-odd crore, given that you have shared 3.37 of ROA for Retail Business?
Yes, Sachinn will take this.
Yeah. Hi, Kunal. We had mentioned that, you know, the hit from the wholesale book overall will not exceed INR 50 crore per quarter, and a maximum of INR 200 crore is what can be built up in any models. You know, as we start moving in more and more into retail, you will start seeing... In fact, this is the first quarter when we have said that let's stop looking at retail, and let's start looking at the consolidated financials and the ratios to be monitored. Because I think the time has now come where we would like to take up that challenge of saying that this is the ROA, 2.53% is the ROA that we have.
We would like to get into the trajectory of 2.8%-3% over a period of time by FY 2026. Which means that directionally, we would want these numbers to keep moving up. We are pretty confident, and that's the reason, I mean, this is a quarter when we've just taken that call, that let's stop looking at just the retail numbers and start monitoring it and achieve that.
Yeah. So in addition to what Sachinn said, you know, as I said, and during my call also, is that now we will move towards adopting the Lakshya goals for consolidated basis. So original goal was retail ROA-
Yeah.
between 2.8%-3%. We are adopting now consolidated retail ROA, Sorry, consolidated ROA to move from 2.8%-3%. We are confident that exit FY 2026, we should be able to hit those numbers.
Sure. And if I can squeeze in one more question. So one is maybe when you look at it in terms of the overlay buffer, you said you will create on the entire unsecured. So now you will add another six provisioning on the INR 6,500 crore of PL, no other segments besides this. So it will be an incremental provision on PL?
PL and SME, both, you know, SME, PL and Rural Business loans, these are the three businesses that are unsecured. As we had mentioned in our earlier calls, the unsecured to secured ratio will be about, you know, unsecured will be in the space of 45%-50%, because that's what the rating agencies are also comfortable with. So over a period of time, as this mix starts coming up, starts growing, it's not that we are going to do immediately in the next quarter, but directionally, we would like to ensure that we are conservative and we create these buffers so that if there is any event-based challenge which comes up, we are able to deal with it without any major impact to the PL.
Sure. Thanks. Thanks and all the best. Yeah.
Thank you so much, Kunal.
Thank you. The next question is from Viral Shah, from IIFL. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi, thank you for taking my question. First of all, congratulations, Sudipta sir, on taking on this role and also on a good set of numbers. I had a few questions.
Yeah.
So basically, first is on the consolidated book. While you are saying that we need to look at now on the consolidated P&L, wanted to check if going forward, if we can give also the breakup of the Stage 1, 2, 3 loans on a consolidated basis. That will help us to get a better clarity on the entire P&L and the balance sheet piece. Just looking at in the isolation on the P&L does not help.
So Viral, you know, if you look at the book itself, it's just down to INR 7,000 crore, and it will come down below 5,000. All we can talk about on that book is that it's a standard book, and it has been... You know, it's not that only the bad book has remained after the downselling. This book is a standard book, and we would not like to, you know, sell it down at throwaway prices very clearly. And that's why we said that we will - our retail mix will be, you know, the next target is to be more than 95%. And next year onwards, you know, if at all the book remains, we will start showcasing a few. There will be few accounts now, which will be left, just three to four accounts.
So, you know, we will have no comms in terms of sharing that data with everyone. At this point of time, frankly, because we are moving into retail, we thought it was advisable to just do the Stage 1, 2, 3. The wholesale book has been going down quarter on quarter. You know, last year, same time, we were sitting on INR 35,000 crore book. No point in showcasing stage-wise things when things are moving so rapidly. It gives a wrong picture. We thought that we will first and do the accelerated sell-down, and once the book becomes stable, in case, suppose we are able to retain the INR 4,000-INR 5,000 crore book, we may possibly look at sharing that.
Okay. The next question I had was on basically the risk-weighted asset growth. So I'm looking at your Tier 1 in this quarter. And if I look at when the basically your net worth, the implied risk-weighted assets, there has been around 3.7% sequential increase in your risk-weighted assets, whereas your loan book has grown at 3.9%. So why would this be, given that a part of your book would have seen higher risk weights in this quarter?
So, you're looking at the end of the quarter. So there are two components to it. One is the profit gets added, okay? The capital is higher at the end of the end of the quarter. Number two is the RBI circular impact was about 60 basis points, and that was only on one of the books, which is the con... You know, PL. So the overall impact was about INR 2,400 crore book, I believe. It was not more than that. And so because the book has been, you know, certain specific books are growing, the CRAR requirement, if you look at between two quarters, it was about 23 basis point, if I'm not wrong, the reduction which had happened. So it's a mix of all these.
You know, one is the circular impact, the other is addition of the profits to the overall capital, and then the change in mix during the quarter.
So it's gone on to 22.99-22.8.
Yeah. So in fact, Tier 1 has gone... I was talking about the overall Tier 1.
Overall, it's gone up on one-
Tier 1 is 22.99-22.8.
84. Got it. And just as a clarification, so your, the Rural Business Finance book does not see higher risk weights, given that it is not a MFI loan, because historically, you have said that it does not qualify in the technical sense of RBI's definition. So will that not see higher risk weight?
So, Rural Business loans, you know, each loan is given specifically for business purposes. The circular applies to loans which are, you know, especially on our book, it is applying to the Personal Loans, which are not specifically given for. The end use is not mentioned as for personal purposes. So till the time it is for consumer consumption, you know, that is what will apply to the circular. All other loans which are given specifically for business purposes are get out of it.
Got it. And, the last question I had, was on the collection efficiencies. So while in, the other segments, it's, trending pretty good, in two specific segments, the Two-Wheeler and the consumer loans or the PL, over there, on a sequential basis, yes, the collection efficiencies is, flattish... but if you look at it, say, on a YoY basis, it is still, anywhere between 20-100 basis points lower. So w- why would this be?
See, on Personal Loans, you know, if you look at, actually, it's, you know, it's actually improved from 98 point, you know, if you see 98.3% at the end of September to about 98.7% in December. So it's actually improved, right? Collection efficiency for Personal Loans. And Two-Wheeler, if you look at what it was in September, it was at 97.9% and gone up to about 98.4% in December. So, so these are like we are trying to... You know, obviously, with every passing month, we are trying to improve our sort of efficiencies. And right now, from a trajectory basis, you know, from a September to December, definitely on Two-Wheeler, Two-Wheeler, we are seeing an improvement in collection efficiencies.
Sorry, but actually, what you are referring to is the collection efficiencies for the month. If you look at it, say, for the full quarter, I think it's kind of similar only, quarter-on-quarter. But more importantly, on a YoY basis, it's still lower. Like, is there any trend that you are seeing? What is driving this?
No, there is no specific sort of risk pockets or anything that we are not seeing, you know. You're also appreciative of the fact that between last year and this year, the book size also improved. Our business base also improved. So, and as I said, we are on Two-Wheeler specifically, I will, you know, even recall, you know, what I said at the beginning of the call, is that we are trying to push our through-the-door funnel towards more and more prime acquisition, right? Either greater than 750 bureau score or EVs or, you know, assets of ticket sizes greater than INR 1.5 lakh. So that is what we have been trying to do, and, you know, over the last three months, we have seen significant progress in that.
We are very confident that that will show up in an improved quality, you know, improved credit quality a couple of quarters from now.
Okay. Got it. And as a corollary to that, I will-
I'm really sorry to interrupt, but may we request you to rejoin the queue as there are-
Sure.
Several other participants waiting for the call. Thank you.
Thank you.
Before we take the next question, we'd like to request participants to please limit their questions to one per participant, so that the management has a chance to address questions from all participants in the conference. We take the next question from the line of Shweta Daptardar from Elara. Please go ahead.
Congratulations all on resuming office at the end and on a good quarter. I had a similar question as previous participant. On the Two-Wheeler front, while you mentioned that you're moving to the prime customer base, what would be the urban-rural divide, as in the prime member rural customer divide? And what could be the NPA range on the Two-Wheeler portfolio?
Shweta, we don't do much of rural Two-Wheelers, actually. Most of our Two-Wheelers are urban and some parts semi-urban, so we don't do much of rural Two-Wheeler. So I'm not sure that I give you a number there on rural.
Okay.
So...
What could be the prime customer mix there on the Two-Wheeler side?
Granularly, you know, we have never given out what is the prime, you know, and the fact is that it is something that we have just started over the, you know, last couple of quarters.
Quarters.
But I'll sort of describe to you what are the sort of segments which are there, right?
Yeah.
So, basically about, you know, anything above INR 1.5 lakh. But yeah, sorry, in our investor deck, we have not given any such sort of breakup, but-
Mm-hmm.
I'll give you what are the sort of, sort of markers we take. The first marker is that, you know, income plus... If you have an income of a particular threshold, which you fall into a particular prime category, a prime category, if your CIBIL Score is above 750, you fall into a prime category. If the asset size is greater than INR 150,000. Typically, we are saying is that if the asset size is more than INR 150,000, your loss rates are about half of, you know, through the other categories. So that falls into a prime category. If someone is putting a high loan-to-value, for example, if someone is putting in about 40% of own equity while buying a Two-Wheeler, the loss rates of that category is much, much lower.
So that also falls into a prime category by our definition. And in, also, if you look at the slide number 14 in the analyst presentation, there we have given the prime customer share, actually, in the analyst deck. You know, if you see, if it has moved from 35% in quarter three FY 2023 to about 41% in quarter three, FY 2024. So there has been about a 6% move in prime. And if you see, the majority of the move has happened after quarter one, FY 2024, where actually we have moved 5 percentage points in the last two quarters. I don't know whether you got that slide. It's slide number 14.
Yeah, yeah, I am, I am on that slide, and this is helping. Just one bit there. So have the NPA trends or is there a downtrending of NPA rates as on today, vis-à-vis two years ago for us on Two-Wheelers?
Sorry, the line was not clear, you know. Can you repeat your question?
So, are our NPA trends or are NPAs in Two-Wheeler portfolio downtrending vis-à-vis, say, two years ago, compared to what it is today?
See, overall, I don't think we have given a NPA trend on our business-wise. We have not given, but overall retail, you know, you just can see overall retail is improving, and the focus is on improving the credit performance and the credit sort of profile of each and every line of our business. We are pushing equally on improving the credit profile of all of our lines of businesses, and one part of it is, you know, maintaining, and if you look at our collection efficiencies on Two-Wheelers, you know, our collection efficiencies also have been holding, right? So that's what the entire focus is, to push the credit quality better and to make sure that your delinquencies sequentially goes further down. Right.
Okay.
If you see in our Stage 1 numbers, especially retail asset quality is actually been overall, in spite of the overall book size growing, your Stage 1 has been going up continuously. So the focus is on improving credit quality on every quarter through every initiative that we are taking.
Okay. So just a similar observation which was made earlier. So in the Home Loan book, your annual growth has been north of 30%-35% odd vis-a-vis slackness in the industry, which you already comprehensively addressed. So can you just also highlight what are... how are the distribution channels there, and what is our LTV?
So our distribution channels-
Distribution as in acquisition, sorry, customer acquisition, say, you know, from the parent or lead generations internally, something on those lines, and your LTV.
So distribution channel, you mean the origination channel for the Home, for the loan? Sorry, I just need clarity to that question.
Yes. Yeah, yeah, origination channel, I meant. Yeah.
Yeah. So the origination channel is basically DSA is one large origination channel. Builder, especially direct builder tie, so APF business is another origination channel. And the third origination channel is our digital / cross-sell channels. So these are the three main origination channels. In terms of LTV, for loan against property, our LTVs are about 65%, and for Home Loan, our average LTV range between 75%-80%.
This is regulatory.
Yeah, anyway, it's regulatory.
Sure, sir, that helps. You already answered partially earlier. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Before we take the next question, a reminder to participants to please limit your questions to one per participant. The next question is from Saurabh Kumar, from JP Morgan. Please go ahead.
Hi, sir. Sir, just one question. So of the securities in book of INR 19,000 crore gross, what was the real estate contribution to this whole book? And of this INR 400 crore recovery, what is the income you've booked in the Q3? Thank you.
So income yields would be in the range of anywhere between 13%-15% when we started, when we would have actually sanctioned these loans, that, that those were the yields that we were getting. But once you actually sell it off to an ARC, that, you know, we can't book any income. So the-
No, no, no, of the recovery, you would have booked, sir, the 400-
Recoveries, I, I mentioned about, INR 4,000 crores is what we recovered, in terms of cash. So, the net book post-recovery is about fifteen thousand crores, and we have made up, overall provisions over the period of time.
Yes, sir, this quarter you have had a INR 400 crore recovery, right? So how much got booked this quarter?
Yeah, this is... Yeah, so this recovery is, the, along with, along with interest and all, it has come about INR 400-
Okay, so it's part of your NII, INR 400 crore.
Yes, yes, it is part of NII.
Okay. And of this INR 19,000 crore, what are-
One second. INR 420 crore is not just interest, no, because it's also a principal which has been recovered.
Yeah. So how much you got booked in general, that's what?
It doesn't come in NII, though.
Okay. Okay.
It's an investment, right? So we can possibly explain to you offline.
Okay, the second is, sir, of the INR 19,000 crore, what is the total value of the real estate book of this INR 19,000 crore?
No, I won't have that number. Maybe we can speak offline.
Okay. Okay, thank you.
Thank you. The next question is from Kaitav Shah, from Anand Rathi. Please go ahead.
So can you talk more about the demographic conditions that present in rural, semi-rural, where you are focused on, how comfortable are you with the growth and collections?
Okay. So, you know, see, India, we just cannot paint one uniform picture across all rural areas. But, you know, what I'll try to do is that give you a sort of a sectoral picture. See, and this is something, you know, there's data available, and, you know, there is perception available. Now, perception comes on during our visits, and data comes, obviously, from syndicated sources. So first, I'll give you a perception, right? A perception which we get when we travel extensively to rural areas, while supervising our various lines of business. So a perception point of view, you know, what we believe is that there is, south of India, especially, there is nothing called, pure rural anymore. South of India, especially in, you know, AP, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Karnataka, it's mostly semi-urban, right?
Where, you know, living standards and during our travel, we have seen. We do not see agrarian distress to a very large extent in the south. And if you look at, though the rainfall has been actually last year because of the El Niño conditions, and there are some water table issues, especially in some markets, our Rural Business Finance demand as well as collection deficiencies continue to remain strong. And so in that way, those businesses are operating quite well. The business in which we have at times the industry is sluggish is the Farmer Finance business, especially our Tractor Finance business, where the industry has sort of more or less seen a sort of even key as compared to what the numbers were last quarter.
But in spite of that, our businesses has continued to grow, because we have been focusing on our repeat customers, as well as making sure that, you know, we have greater penetration at a particular dealer level. So I think the rural economy is quite, I would use the word resilient as of now, right? In spite of some of the sort of erratic rainfall, et cetera. But if you look at the Rabi sowing right now, which the leading data that we have, the Rabi, the acreage under Rabi sowing has actually improved. It's about 5% more than what the expected number was, which actually augurs well for the crop going forward. So I would say that we cautiously, you know, we are looking at this particular area.
The fact is that wherever there are certain pockets of support which are needed, the government is stepping in and providing that, those pockets of support, either in terms of MSP or in terms of fertilizer subsidy or whatever, right? So that way, I do believe that the rural sector is quite resilient, and there is, we do not see any, as of now, we do not see any massive headwinds developing in this particular sector, and we expect to maintain our normal business trajectories as well as collection efficiencies going forward.
Thank you. We'll take that as the last question. I would now like to hand the conference back to Mr. Sudipta Roy for closing comments.
Thank you, everyone, for joining us this morning, and we like the interaction with all of you. As I said, we'll be also available for one-on-one meetings or any other clarity history questions that we might need to spend more time on an offline basis. We're happy to do that. As you are aware that Mr. Dinanath Dubhashi has wrapped up in a space eight long years of tenure at the helm of this organization. So it is fitting that I would - I should invite him to say a few words at the close of this analyst call.
Thank you. Thank you.
Please.
Thank you, Sudipta. Thank you very much. Thank you, all of you. In fact, there is, as I sit here today, there is only one word which comes to my mind, which is thank you. I'm feeling tremendous amount of gratitude towards each one of you. I received, lots of support, lots of respect, lots of love from each one of you. First of all, I wish each one of you all the very best in your lives. God bless all of you and your near and dear ones. That will be my biggest wish. I wish Sudipta and his team all the very best, and I have full confidence that the company will give growth to immense strengths under his leadership. I would... You know, I've been listening to the questions, and I would just, just summarize that, you know, there will be details.
There are quarter-on-quarter movements and all that. But I would like to share with you the direction that the company is taking, and we are just talking about the next, you know, till the Lakshya 2026. You will see exciting plans being raised even after that. But just talking about 2026, just talking about history, you know, one year back, when we started the rapid reduction of wholesale, there were quite a few people who doubted whether we'll be able to do it without any drag, any hit to P&L. And I think the team has indicated that not only the team has remained together, but that kind of, you know, beyond everybody's expectation, the reduction has been shown.
And let me assure you that that will continue, and the promise of any further shift to P&L not being there will be kept. We have also built tremendous amount of strengths, business strengths, channel strengths on each of our businesses. Again, there will be quarter-on-quarter move ups, downs, based on industry. But based on the channel strengths, business strengths, we have built a cross-selling, upselling strengths we are building. We will try to smoothen them as much as possible and have a secular growth, which the team has been showing till now and will continue to show. Lots of questions on credit costs, and I would only say that till now, we have been tremendously concentrating not only on underwriting, but also collection and maintaining and reducing that, you know, the trajectory of credit cost.
With the new initiative that Sudipta has brought to the table with his experience from his previous organization, I am adding to that. I'm absolutely confident that credit costs will trend down secularly. There were questions about quarter-on-quarter, how will it go, et cetera. Of course, those things will keep happening, but secularly, and we have shown that also over the last few years. The only item which we believe will remain a little sticky is the OpEx. We have always indicated that the investment in people, investment in branches, investment in digital, investment in brands, we will not be shy of them. We believe that this bodes well for the long-term future of the company.
I can only now summarize by saying that always the ROE bridge that we have guided towards indicates and now even at consolidated level, and Sudipta upgrading the same guidances from retail to consolidated, very clearly shows the intent of the management. And, you know, way back in 2016, I had talked about management intent, and I see the same intent when Sudipta is upgrading, you know, the target, keeping them same, whatever for retail, now for consolidated. So all this bodes well, and I would only request all of you that the same support, same, love, same, respect that you gave me, much more than that, I'm sure and hope that you will give it to Sudipta. With that, I will sign off. Many of you know my personal number, personal emails.
If you don't know, you can take, and it will be great to generally interact with each one of you. I'm sure I will only benefit. Thank you very much, and God bless you.
Thank you so much.
With that, we would end this call.
Thank you very much. On behalf of L&T Finance Holdings Limited, that concludes this conference. Thank you for joining us, ladies and gentlemen. You may now disconnect your lines.