Saturday 5 March 2016

Banks now have room to raise funds via tier 2 bonds: RBI

With the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) tweaking of banks’ core capital to include a part of real estate assets and foreign exchange, lenders will now have additional headroom to raise funds through tier 2 bonds, RBI deputy governor R Gandhi said on Thursday.

He told reporters on the sidelines of Gyan Sangam, a brainstorming session with financial sector players convened by the finance ministry, that Rs 25,000 crore of capital allocated for public sector banks in FY17 should be enough. “Banks can also go to the markets next year, so we believe it will be enough,” he said
On asset quality review, Gandhi said it is unlikely bad loans will spill over from FY16 to the next fiscal. “Spillover of bad loans unlikely in FY17 after the asset quality review,” he said. State-owned banks have been under severe stress arising out of delinquency in loans mostly belonging to infrastructure, power and steel sectors. As of September 2015, the stressed asset ratio — a combination of bad loans and recast assets — of public sector banks stood at 14.1%, versus 4.6% in private sector banks.
As per the RBI’s latest move, which is in sync with the Basel III capital norms, banks can account for 45% of their revalued real estate assets as tier 1 capital subject to riders.
The revised regulations on tier 1 capital include treating revaluation reserves, subject to conditions, as Common Equity Tier 1 (CET1) capital at a discount of 55%, instead of as tier 2 capital; treating foreign currency translation reserves, subject to conditions, as CET1 capital at a discount of 25%; and several directives on how to treat deferred tax assets vis-à-vis CET1 capital. These changes could improve the capital adequacy ratio of major PSBs by up to 100 basis points.
According to estimates, these relaxations, particularly that of treating revaluation reserves as CET1 capital, given the huge amounts of physical assets PSBs are sitting on, will free up capital upwards of Rs 30,000 crore-35,000 crore for them and upwards of Rs 5,000 crore for private sector banks.
Hinting that the RBI is looking at all such possible measures to augment the existing capital of banks, which would reduce the burden on them to raise fresh capital to a certain extent, governor Raghuram Rajan had hinted that the RBI is trying to identify non-recognisable capital, such as undervalued assets, already on bank balance sheets and could allow some of these to count as capital under Basel norms, provided a bank meets minimum common equity standards.

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