Q2 25/26

Oct 14, 2025

Ladies and gentlemen, good day and welcome to the Bank of Maharashtra Q2 and H1 FY2026 earnings conference call. As a reminder, all participant lines will remain in the listen-only mode. There will be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the presentation concludes. Should you need assistance during this conference call, please signal the operator by pressing star then zero on your touch-tone telephone. Please note that this conference is being recorded. We have with us from the management Sri Nidhu Saxena, Managing Director and CEO, Sri Rohit Rishi, Executive Director, and all Chief General Managers and General Manager of the bank. I will now hand the conference over to Mr. Sri Nidhu Saxena for opening remarks. Thank you and over to you. Thank you and good afternoon and thank you for joining this on call. Today we have done our Q2 and HY results. I will very quickly cover the main highlights while you have gone through the presentation. The highlighting features: our total business grew by 14%, taking it to INR 5.63 lakh crore. Deposits have gone up by 12.13%. Advances have gone up by almost 17%. CD ratio for us has improved to 82%. Gross NPAs have declined to 1.72%. Net NPAs have declined to 0.18%. Our provision coverage ratio is standing at 98.34%. Net profit too has increased by 23% and the number is INR 1,633 crore. Operating profit has grown by 17% to INR 2,500 crore. Net interest income has increased by almost 16%. NIM stood at a healthy 3.85%. Cost-to-income has also improved to 37.1%. ROE has improved to 1.82% ROE. Ladies and gentlemen, we have lost the line of the management. Please stay connected while I reconnect the management. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we have the management line reconnected. Nidhu Saxena sir, please go ahead. Yes. Sorry for that technical disruption. I was mentioning about the last item. Our capital adequacy is improving to 18.13%, within which the Tier 1 is standing at 14.96%, almost 15%. The loan book is also behaving well. SMA 1 plus 2, which is always an element of concern within the overall SMA book, have actually gone down from 2.61% to 1.87%. It has been an improvement of 74 bps. Couple of things over and above these parameters of business growth, asset quality, efficiency ratio, profitability, and capital adequacy metrics. I would like to also mention that S&P Global has assigned us a BBB- rating, which is a 3-notch improvement over what another international rating agency has assigned to the bank. Now we have two international agencies that have assigned ratings for the bank. Our GIFT IBU, which was made operational in this quarter within a period less than six months of the Reserve Bank of India according approval to our application, we have operationalized the GIFT IBU. We have closed this half year with $100 million of business in the IBU, and there is a complete pipeline that is getting built to see that we are getting more and more traction in that IBU. We are keeping aspirations. We have yet to put some numbers, but maybe can it be a $1 billion book in the next 12 months. Of course, it should be a profitable business, which is also our aspiration in the GIFT IBU branch. The rating improvements and sharp improvement which has come from the international rating agency. We are also seeing traction in FII holding, which is going up steadily and very lately. Recently, we are seeing interest getting built up in FIIs who are looking and tracking our stock. From 0.39% FII holding in 2023, we have for September 2025 the FII holding has improved to 2.58%. Likewise, the mutual funds have also been building books with our Bank of Maharashtra script in their kitchen. We are also the bank which is consistently outperforming the industry. One big enabler I will speak about is that we are fast expanding our presence in potential growth centers of the country. That is one thing which has not only helped us register this more than industry performance, but it is also helping us sustain this kind of growth performance in the years to come. Because this is a five year plan to open 1,000 branches in the next five years, is what the broad board approval we are having, within which in this FY we have taken one big initiative to open 321 branches. We are calling it Project 321. The plan is to open 321 branches in the next 18 months. These branches are shortlisted after doing a scientific exercise using a lot of data points, taking help from an external agency. Am I audible or is there an issue again? Sir, you are audible. Please go ahead. Thank you. Thank you, Diane. What I was trying to convey is this Project 321 is an ambitious initiative taken in this FY to see that. Ladies and gentlemen, we have lost the line of the management. Please stay connected while I rejoin the management. Sam. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your patience. We have the management line reconnected, sir. Please go ahead. Thank you and I'm sorry once again for that disruption, but I will continue. What we were talking about is the new branch opening that we have shortlisted after doing a scientific exercise, taking help of an external agency for us to understand these are the potential growth centers of the country, potential growth centers of the nation, that we are opening our presence in a phased manner. This is what is going to also support and sustain our fast growth rate that we are clocking every quarter on quarter. So. Whatever guidance numbers that we have been sharing, I am satisfied as a bank, as a management, that whatever guidance at the beginning of the year for the last 12 to 15 months we've been talking about, we are maintaining and achieving meeting our own guidance. If you look at the metrics of importance to the investors, specifically the ROA, ROE, NIM, these numbers we are having a decent guidance for NIM of 3.75%. This quarter also we have, despite the rate cut impact coming in completeness in this quarter, we have been able to maintain our NIM above the guidance that we had shared in the beginning and the Q3 and Q4. We feel that with most of our deposit maturity profile seeing the deposits getting repriced, we should see that further NIM contraction should not be. We are keeping a conservative number of 3.75% in terms of the NIM guidance. Let me take a pause here and maybe take some questions before we keep sharing a couple of other things. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press STAR and one on their touchstone telephone. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press STAR and two. Participants are requested to use their handsets while asking a question. Ladies and gentlemen, we will wait for a moment while the question queue assembles. The first question comes from the line of Rohan Mandora from Aquarius Securities. Please go ahead. Good afternoon sir. Thanks for the opportunity. I wanted to understand the movement and cost of deposits this quarter, which has gone up by 8 bps. What was the benefit from term deposit rate cut, and what was the adverse impact from the current account changes, the decline in car balances? Right. If you see our deposit growth for this quarter, year on year we have grown deposit by 12.12% around that, but within which CASA has grown at almost 15%. Focus clearly stands out to have more and more low cost deposit in the system, and the high cost bulk wherever we have identified which is sitting in our deposit book, we have been very consciously not renewing the bulk high cost deposits. What data I will share is that our bulk deposits have seen a degrowth of 9.9%—9.9% degrowth in the bulk deposits. Deposits have grown majorly from the CASA which has grown at 15%, and that's how the total story is growing at 12%. Right. Sir, question the cost of deposits. The cost of deposit, maybe it is 7.8 bps which has gone up, but we are. Ladies and gentlemen, we have lost the line of the management. Please stay connected while I rejoin the management. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your patience. We have the management line reconnected. Rohan, if you can please repeat your question for the management. Yeah, hi sir, I was understanding the cost of deposits increase. The reasons for that. The question was well understood. I was trying to, I'd already started. I think we'll have to bear there is some technical challenge repeatedly, but still I understood your question. As I said, focus with us is to maintain our deposit growth majorly through the low cost element. We have done a lot of efforts to see that both the components, the core CASA that is coming from our branches and the institutional CASA which we focus from institutions, government departments, ministries, corporates, we have a separate vertical that takes care of that. These two components are being strategically achieved. The two objectives are strategically achieved through a lot of strategies that we have put in place. If I have to tell you. In. terms of business that is happening in branches, we have done a lot of product improvements. We have introduced products for some segments where we were missing. Today we have a complete basket of products that is taking care of the professionals, the HNIs, the NRIs, the business community, and so current saving salaried, non-salaried, we have a complete basket of products. We have also looked at the process part, whether the process is seamless, seamless onboarding of clients to the bank's business, and once they are onboarded, whether they are able to seamlessly transact. Today if you ask me, our mobile banking application we have revamped. We have not just upgraded our existing mobile application by introducing a new version, but we have revamped the version and this is moving faster. The concept of giving ease of doing business for a client, that they are able to transact on this mobile application with minimum number of clicks, has been the theory in building, in developing this mobile banking application. Someone should experience it to understand what I am indicating to. A lot of technology is helping in this segment, the individual core segment that is happening in branches. For the institutional segment, we have started with putting up a new business vertical, calling it as new business customer acquisition vertical headed by a Lady General Manager, having a complete structure with her and reaching out. The only two KRA is to reach out to institutions and look at their banking needs and try to get institutional deposits from them, bringing some value also to the institutional clients and understanding their specific needs and also offering some technology-based solutions there. These two verticals are independently working. We have seen that while the industry CASA was 44% some 12 to 15 months back, it has come down to almost 36, 37%. In our case, we have been able to maintain our guidance to maintain CASA above 50%. Even if this quarter 50.35%, we have a little bit cost of deposits because of the fixed deposits repricing is in the process to happen and six to eight months is the maturity profile where we will see that my entire portfolio gets repriced and a little bit I would also assign it to the interest rate cycle. Today clients are also more aware. A lot of your CASA has moved to term deposits wherever the liquidity is not immediately required. Clients have created fixed deposits, some deposits for a longer duration in anticipation that the rate cut cycle will also let the fixed deposit rates in system go down. That is how for me that 5, 6 bps increase in deposits has happened. I think going forward. Ladies and gentlemen, we have lost the line of the management once again. Please stay connected while I rejoin the management. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your patience. We have the management line reconnected, so please go ahead. Rohan, I'm sincerely apologizing because it is disconnecting. I think very clearly I said there is a core business of CASA, there is an institutional business of CASA. We are trying to address both these components with a different strategy that is working for us. We are trying to see that we maintain this low cost element in our deposit profile, which is a big enabler, contributor to our bottom line. The system would have seen the average CASA at some point of time, which was in the industry 44%, 43%, 44% came down to almost 37%. We have been able to maintain our guidance to maintain it above 50%. That is one. Second, a lot of our experience is that with this rate, you know, cuts in the deposit side, also clients are also parking their money from the CASA to creating term deposits with us. That's how the same money. We heard all of these points. This one is well understood. Okay. Okay. I think we can go to the next question. I think if I can go to the next, second was on what is. The outstanding AFS reserve at the end. Of 2Q, it's around INR 340 crore on the ground basis. Okay. This similar number is INR 500 crore at the end of 1Q, right. I couldn't get you. The number at the end of 1Q was INR 500 crore, which is INR 340 crore right now. Yes sir. Yes. Okay. There's almost a 10.5% Q1Q increase in credit RW this quarter. If you can explain what is the reason for that. Come here and talk. One second. My CRO is just joining the call and he will respond. He's almost there. Yeah. Sir, if you see that total RWA from June to September has increased around INR 16,000 crore. Out of which, if we break up, the credit RWA has increased around INR 15,000 crore and market risk RWA has increased around INR 1,180 crore. If you see, the credit RWA has increased because of advances, that gross advances increased around INR 14,000 crore and there is some extra undrawn used there. That is also increased around INR 7,700 crore. Gold swap Miladi is around INR 16,400 crore. Okay. Okay. The higher share is because of the undrawn lines as well. Okay, sir. Got it. Sure, sir. Thank you. Thank you. We take the next question from the line of Abhishek Kotari from Aviva India. Please go ahead. Sir, if you could guide with respect to your growth that I'm seeing in the RAM portfolio. Retail has grown very nicely. You know SME and agri, the growth is lagging behind. Any thoughts over there? RAM overall share is 62:38. Our guidance has been to maintain it at 60:40 plus minus 2%. Yes, we are doing a conscious rebalancing in the two verticals. The idea behind it is the loan book that we are creating must be of good quality. Borrowers, prime borrowers. In the agri portfolio, what we are making a shift is we are going from production credit to investment credit and trying to look at reaching out to some mid-segment kind of clients. Ladies and gentlemen, we have lost the line of the management once again. Please stay connected while I rejoin the management. Sam. Ladies and gentlemen, we have the management line reconnected. Sir, please go ahead. While the overall guidance is 60-40 plus minus 2%, we are already at 62%. If you see in the retail, there are a couple of products which are seeing a lot of traction. The housing loan, home loans are growing at a fast growth rate of 30%, 31% for us. Gold loans have grown at 47%. Vehicle loans have grown at 49%. These are our own set of clients who have been banking with us. We have tweaked some schemes to introduce new customer-friendly schemes to bring them on our fold. The entire focus in this segment is towards the big ticket advances where we are seeing the LTV is also very favorable to the bank. We are having that comfort that this growth in the retail portfolio, we are growing in the segment which is constituting the prime and super prime borrowers. Like in the bank today, there is no loan that is available for a client having CIBIL score less than 681. That, as per the definition of TransUnion CIBIL, is a subprime segment. We have strengthened our underwriting benchmark. That is one of the reasons that industry growth is supporting in these retail segments. Plus, we have done a lot of product improvisations, introducing new product lines to see that there is good traction in the retail, in the agriculture, and MSME. While we grow the loan book, we are mindful of the asset quality that we are going to the pool of assets that we are going to create. We are focusing this time more on investment credit, some big ticket mid-segment kind of proposals where we will see a lot of ancillary business opportunities coming in—cold storage, dal mill, rice mill. Ticket size also will improve, portfolio will also, we will get some ancillary business. We will get some tangible security which are going to be with those credit limits that we are going to consider for borrowers. That kind of consciousness, migrating from production link to investment link credit in the production, in the KCC, we have already created digital journeys. We would want the underwriting for small ticket KCC loans to be end-to-end digitalized. To begin with, two states we have picked up. State of Maharashtra is the first, where luckily we have the exposure, good exposure, and the land records in this state are fully digitalized. With that, end-to-end journey is possible in underwriting for the small ticket size KCC loans. That's how the strategy is. I think in coming quarters, we will see a lot of traction in these two segments also. To answer your question, in one line, Bank of Maharashtra is looking at wherever profitable opportunities for growth are there. We will definitely be participating. We will be mindful of the quality of the loan book that is getting created and how the loan in times to come should be behaving. We are fully mindful of that and that's how we are going to increase. Your capital consumption was high in this quarter, around 193 bps. You have a resolution or board approval in place for fundraise. By when could we expect your fundraise to come by? Will it be this fiscal, let's say Q4, or will it go to next fiscal? There are plans, we have approvals in place from our board, from the government, RBI, shareholders. Approvals are in place to go for a fundraise within this FY. We are definitely looking at the opportune time and opportune mode to do that. The one aspect that I would like to share here is while the capital adequacy stands at almost 18%, which is our guidance to maintain it going forward. Yes, 193 bps that we have consumed. If I factor in the profitability of these two quarters, my CRAR improves by another 1.72%. This is one thing. Coming back to your fundraise query, yes. Ladies and gentlemen, we have lost the line of the management once again. Please stay connected while I rejoin the management. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your patience. The management line is facing some technical problems. Please stay connected while they fix the problem. Thank you. Sam. Ladies and gentlemen, we have the management line reconnected. Sir, please go ahead. My apologies. I think we have been able to identify the snag and hopefully the call should not get interrupted, but please bear with us. We were trying to explain the capital raising question. Yes, there are definite plans. I have INR 7,500 crore of approval from the board, within which equity is INR 5,000 crore. The rest is debt. At the opportune time in the remaining FY, we would definitely like to take a call on this, and the opportune mode we will use to go for the fundraiser. Just to ask, would you be raising the entire INR 5,000 crore, or will it be like INR 2,500 crore kind of a number? Since this enabler is there and we take it from the beginning of the year, that approval is on the higher side. If you ask me, there is no urgent emergent need for using the growth capital, but going forward our guidance is to maintain at this healthy level, and that makes the case for going for a capital raise to fund the growth that we are fast clocking. The branch expansion, reaching out to new geographies, is only helping us with more and more business opportunities coming to the bank. One of the reasons with us is that we started the last FY with the Government of India holding standing at 86.46%. With the last rate, it has come down to 79.6%. It is below 80% now. To comply with the SEBI MPS norm, we have just to complete this tranche of 4.6%. Once that is happening, we are complying with the SEBI guidelines of minimum public shareholders. These two reasons are very much there in our mind, and at the opportune time we are definitely going to decide to do this effort within this effort. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, in the interest of time and fairness to others, we request you to restrict to two questions per participant. We take the next question from the line of Suraj Das from Sundaram Mutual Fund. Please go ahead. Am I audible? Yeah. Hi sir, thanks for the opportunity. Sir, two questions. First one is, agree GNPA has increased quite a lot over the last one year and the number is touching almost 10% now. Anything specific that is happening there? Any particular state or anything there? That is question one. Question two, sir, your comment on any impact there on both the credit cost or the asset quality side as well as on the fee income side. Because now I think fee will be amortized. These are my two questions. There are three elements of your question if I have understood correctly. One is the increase in the agricultural NPA. Second is on fee income. What was the third part? Credit cost. This is again, sorry, fee income. Credit cost is in the context of ECL. Okay, understood. ECL, I will take that and agree NPA. Agree NPA is again a conscious strategy to recognize the issue and then go ahead and resolve it. Although what we have seen is the first half of the year, and more particularly the first quarter, we would see some slippages in the agri segment. We had also been trying to rebalance our agricultural loan book. As I was mentioning a little while ago, what is the segment of agriculture that we will be looking at? Mike. Ladies and gentlemen, we have lost the line of management. Once again, please stay connected while I rejoin the management. Sa. Ladies and gentlemen, we have the management line reconnected. Sir, please go ahead. We were discussing agricultural NPA. What we have seen is some agriculture stress in some pockets in some branches where we have seen incessant rains and flooding and those kinds of small, small issues at the holistic level. Also, I mentioned about we are rebalancing our agri book and taking it towards the investment credit side. We were a little slow in doing the production KCC credit for some time. We had consciously decided to have the underwriting in one level above, not allow the branches. Somehow the portfolio in terms of volume has not grown, so the denominator actually reduced and the NPA stayed there and you see the percentage slightly going up. This is one. Also, the RBI guidelines on classifying your advances, gold loan advances, agriculture had gone through some changes and then again it has gone for something. That's how a lot of our agriculture classified gold loans, we had marked them as non-priority to comply with the RBI guideline and it was a substantial number. In real terms, nothing has happened in the agriculture NPA, but this rebalancing plus this RBI guidelines undergoing a change, which again now up to INR 200,000 they have, RBI has permitted, and we are again able to reclassify that to the agriculture gold loans. Because anything and everything that is getting to be done has to be compliant with what the regulator expectations, regulatory guidelines are. That is first and foremost requirement. This is how the agriculture NPA for the moment is looking elevated. But. We are very consciously working on it and going forward we don't see any major challenges. Our strategy may take a quarter or two when we are onboarding fresh advances, big ticket advances in the agri segment and we are able to build the denominator also. You will see the percentage also normalizing in this and the following quarter. Coming to the next ECL calculations, once it was indicated as something as a forthcoming guideline, the broad number is there with us, INR 2,500 crore. We had already started proactively providing for ECL provisions. I am holding in my balance sheet INR 250 crore of ECL provisions. If I give you a sense of it, it is INR 2,500 crore to be maintained from 1st April 2027 to 31st March 2031. There is a glided path available. The number is requiring me to provide INR 100 to 125 crore every quarter towards ECL, which is a number one which is very well managed. We see absolutely no challenge in making those provisions when the guidelines are coming into effect from 1st of April. Credit cost, yes, credit cost has seen slight improvement in this particular quarter. Credit cost has actually come down from Q-on-Q if you look at from 1.19% to 0.92%. I think our new underwriting norms which are put in place for the last 10-12 months, wherein even in the individual segmented loans we are not underwriting to the subprime category. For the MSME loans, we are benchmarking our underwriting to CMR ranks given by the TransUnion CIBIL. Anything which is below the investment grade is not considered in the bank. Only CMR 1, 2, 3, 4 and up to CMR 5, which are defined as investment grade, is what we have restricted. If I give you a sense of data, home loans that have happened in this bank, this fantastic growth of 31-30% after we have introduced that no home loans below 681. In the last 10-12 months, what home loan sanctions have happened with. Ladies and gentlemen, we have lost the line of the management. Please stay connected while I rejoin the management. Thank you. SA. Ladies and gentlemen, we have the management line reconnected. Sir, please go ahead. Yes, I was sharing an example. An outcome of the one simple step of no underwriting in the bank below 681 in the home loan segment, one product category. My 27% of home loan sanctions that have happened in the last 12 months are 800 and above CIBIL score category. 57% has happened in CIBIL score category 750 and 800. You will see the major underwriting that is happening is in the prime and the super prime category. In times to come, quarters to come, we will see that the slippage number, which has shown slight improvement, is on the right track of building a loan book which is of right rated, good rated borrowers, prime category borrowers. The slippages, which is a guidance for us, is to maintain below 1%. We would be able to maintain it on a sustainable basis. Sure, sir. Just one follow up, sir, on the fee income. Do you see any decline in fee income? Because now you have to amortize fee under ECL versus now I think a funding of fee income. We are the way we are going, growing the credit and along with fund based, non fund based. The opportunities that we are creating for enhancing our fee based processing charges, LCB commission. We have identified other main areas of augmenting the fee income. We have gone for entering into new partnerships. Today we are joined with SBI Cards where we are offering co-branded cards. This is one of the leading credit card companies offering best of the offerings for clients. My clients I am seeing are enrolling in large numbers. We are seeing the traction and I am getting feebies. Like this, bank assurance is another area. We have ramped up our partnerships in life and non-life and these partners are in the process of onboarding. We are also very conscious of the mis-selling part of it. We are digitalizing the entire end-to-end policy issuance so that there is no chance left for any income leakage, revenue leakage and right selling practices. Customers getting what they actually require. We are mindful of that. All these elements which contribute to enhancing our fee based is definitely in our to do list. We very consciously want to improve this parameter of performance also. Thanks so much for all the answers. One last thing. You have Covid provision of INR 1,200 crore also. That INR 2,500 crore of ECL provisions is after adjusting for this INR 1,200 crore, or can you use this towards the INR 2,500 crore? It is not just INR 1,200 crore of COVID provisioning. Today we have enough provisioning in the balance sheet cushion, which is almost now INR 3,000 crore, which can be. This is our very conscious strategy, going by what guidance comes from the regulator also from time to time, that we have the good times for the industry and all the players, entities operating within it. We should be looking at building extra cushions and buffers in the balance sheets. That's how we are doing it. INR 2,500 crore, I am holding today almost INR 3,000 crore. I can do it in one go, but that's not what is the right prescription to do, INR 2,500 crore. As against that, we have already built INR 250 crore. We may follow a guided path, as is also allowed by the regulator, to create the provisions. Sure sir. Thank you so much. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, due to time constraint, we request you to restrict to two questions per participant. The next question comes from the line of Siddharth Rajpurohit from Systematics Group. Please go ahead. Thank you sir for the opportunity. First on gold loans, what will be your LTV in the agri and non-agri space? Ladies and gentlemen, we have lost the line of the management. Please stay connected while I reconnect the management. Thank you. Sam. Ladies and gentlemen, we have the management line reconnected. Please go ahead. LGB in the board. Yes, I got your question sir. I'm replying to that. LTV in gold loans, the RBI guidelines are 75% at all times. For agriculture, we have kept 85% LTV and we have some variants within this range in the non-priority. Wherever we get higher LTV, we offer a lesser ROI to incentivize clients to come and pay a higher rate. I mean, if they want more loan, they have to pay me a higher pricing. The pricing is tweaked towards, you know, lower the higher LTV, which is our safety. In the agriculture segment, we are 85%. All our product variants are following the RBI LTV norm of minimum 75% at all times. The second on your small and medium segment. In the segment, sequentially, the NPAs have gone up. What is the trend that we are seeing? Are there incremental pain that is in this segment? Also, if you can, these are numbers above INR 5 crore. If you can give some trends that you have observed in, say, below INR 5 crore tickets also. The NPA in the lower segment we are trying to address on a long-term basis. Mostly for like Mudra segment loans, we have created digital journeys online end to end. A customer can, without reaching to our branch, online make the application, the processing, the documentation, and disbursement happens end to end online. What we do for maintaining the quality part of it is that the rules we are prescribing in this digital journey, bres are decided by the bank to see that the beneficiaries are the right kind of beneficiaries that are entering into this loan book. My system, once they follow this underwriting, our experience is whatever physical mode that we have been asked while doing legacy, the loan book that is getting created through digital sanctions, end to end digital journey, the quality, the stress level, everything is far, far better. With that, the low ticket loans we are migrating, whether in the agri segment or in the micro MSME segment, we are all migrating to these digital journeys. Within this, we also have done a lot of co-lending partnerships. Almost eight to nine co-lending partnerships we are having today. Of course, the RBI guidelines have undergone change and I have to make it compliant now with those things. We have built a good. Through. Co-lending where we are getting a reasonable pricing and we are having this co-lending and the business that happens entirely digitalized end to end is which itself. There is no intervention from the branch when they are dealing with the low ticket size. This is the broad way to look at the micro and that kind of stress that generally may be experienced in the lower segment and pricing the risk also properly. Are you seeing some incremental stress in the MSME space of late? It is not something too alarming in the retail and MSME if you ask me the stress which is there. Retail more than 50% of book is home loans and home loans it is backed by a mortgage. If there is an account which is experiencing stress and tomorrow SMA2 it will slip to a delinquent category. We can start the recovery action very fast. With a mortgage I am able to recover my dues also. We are seeing quick upgrades also happening, because since it's backed by mortgage and the value of security only appreciates. We are not seeing any stress in that retail element. Yes. Ladies and gentlemen, you have lost the line of the management. Please stay connected while I rejoin the management. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your patience. We have the management line reconnected, sir. Please go ahead. Just final question sir. On the MSME particularly sir, are you seeing an incremental stress? MSME in fact if you see my absolute number, in percentage terms it has gone down from 2. For which slide number it is. Yeah. In the presentation. If that is accessible to you, sir, MSME has the stress number. Where is it? Year on year, if you see September 2024 was 2.39%. It has come down to 1.73%. Now if you see for my bank, I mean the MSME portfolio is also behaving well. There's no issue. Thank you. We take the next question from the line of Akshay Badlani from HDFC Securities. Please go ahead. Hello. Yeah, hi. Thank you for taking my question. Just wanted to understand, given the fact that the ECL provisions, the impact is INR 100 to 125 crore per quarter, what are we sensing in terms of a credit cost, like a sustainable credit cost guidance, if we could get? Also, given the fact that our tax rate would get normalized also at maybe some extent during 2026 or 2027, what could be the normalized credit cost range that we are looking for? Right. Credit cost guidance has been to maintain it below 1%. If you see September 2025, we have achieved 0.92% on a half yearly basis. It is marginally 2 basis points above 1.02%. I think we are seeing that the steps that we have taken to keep the credit cost in line are delivering the results, and this guidance number going forward also we would be maintaining to keep the credit cost below 1%. This is including the ECL impact as well that we'll additionally provide for the next four to five years. Right? Right. So. Mostly in terms of IRAC norms, if you look at my net NPA, it is 0.18%. Now, to maintain that kind of net NPA number whenever, every quarter, whenever we are encountering slippages. As against the IRAC norm of providing 15% on day one, we are providing 100%. That's how my credit cost also looks elevated. If I say from the IRAC perspective, it is ranging from 0.4% to 0.45%. In real terms, if I look at as per the regulator norms, my credit cost is 0.4%. Because of this maintaining, we find a net NPA of 0.18%. I am providing 100% against the regulatory prescribed of 15%. Understood? Understood. Sorry, just to add, provision coverage ratio if you see is 98.37%. Now with 98.37% I don't have the pressure of aging provisions. It's mostly book which is provided for. It is also 90.37%. With that kind of high provisioning, we are holding, the aging provision pressure is also not there. Understood. Got it. The second question was, you know, given the fact that you have given the start date of 321 branches, you know. In the next 18 months, how do we, you know, in which. Which geographies are we seeing these incremental branches? Which geographies do we, you know, how much of it would be, like, non-Maharashtra, given the fact that we are looking to expand beyond Maharashtra as well? Which kind of geographies are we looking for to expand? If you ask me, Maharashtra, which is not that it is not important. The highest contributing state to the nation's GDP, we all know, is Maharashtra. Our current branch presence gives us a sense that may adequately represent. Ladies and gentlemen, we have lost the line of the management. Please stay connected while I rejoin the management. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we have the management line reconnected. Please go ahead. Yes. I was responding to our branch expansion strategy, sir. As I explained, we are adequately represented within Maharashtra. Our expansion is all beyond Maharashtra, outside Maharashtra. If you see, 12 months from now, our branch ratio was 52% Maharashtra. The other side is non Maharashtra. That ratio has changed to 42% now in Maharashtra. Rest is all outside Maharashtra. The thousand branches that we have taken approval and the 321, it is all opening branches outside Maharashtra. Very consciously we are planning our presence where two things are happening. One, there is an existing banking business potential already there. Second, the growth is also happening. The scientific work that we have done using a lot of data points, they have down to the pin code level. One center suppose has three PIN codes. A Kanpur city if has three to four pin codes, we have a recommendation from the external expert that this is a pin code that you should be opening the branch, where the city is expanding. That makes a lot of sense. We are opening branches where the existing banking potential is there and potential for growth is also there. Our sense is that when you are going to be one another player in a matured market, it will be very difficult to get traction. If you are going to open your shops in places where the opportunities are increasing, business is growing, you will find that there'll be a scope for a new player to also garner reasonable business in the first year of operations. We have very clear laid down metrics that if it's a Metro branch, that branch, how much of business in the next 12 months of opening is that they will be expected to garner? Within which what should be the ratio of advances, what is deposits. We would expect a branch on their own to become a profit center head for us. That's how very clearly measurable metrics for the new branches in metro, urban, semi urban and rural also. If you see my business new business vertical that I mentioned about, they are now in this year given five focus states which are of course Maharashtra, we have a strong patronage, we are building on that, building on that relationship through more cross selling to the institutional clients also. Outside Maharashtra, replicating our experience and handling institutional business in five focus states. If you ask me, those focus states, these are the states where the central allocations are coming in big numbers. We have done analysis, studied the budget, the allocations, and we have a sense that there is always a scope for a new player to even garner institutional business. These five focus states, my new business vertical approaches, and they are able to offer, understand their needs, and offer customized tech-based solutions and get that business on board. We have got a lot of traction from this initiative. This year we've only gone ahead and strengthened the vertical further with every 50 zonal offices having some extended arm of the new business vertical. That's how we are approaching the branch expansion strategy. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Due to time constraint, we take that as the last question and we conclude the question and answer session. I now hand the conference over to Shri Nidhu Saxena for his closing comments. I think there were rounds of disruptions and probably some time got consumed. We are very actively and aggressively doing the reach out outside these quarterly calls and meeting the investors and analysts and the community as a whole, both domestic and foreign. I think that kind of initiative will keep going on. Thank you. Thank you on behalf of Bank of Maharashtra. That concludes this conference. Thank you for joining us. You may now disconnect your lines.