ICICI Bank comfortable on liquidity: Kocchar

Says overall credit demand has been very positive. It has been over 18%

Amid the general pressure on liquidity, ICICI Bank, the country's largest private sector lender, says it is “very comfortable” in this regard.

“We have diversified our funding base. Our reliance on wholesale deposits has come down substantially,” Managing Director Chanda Kochhar said here on Friday after inaugurating a corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiative.

On credit growth in the banking system, she said demand had been very positive on the whole, a little over 18 per cent. Credit growth is mainly coming from steady and healthy demand in the retail segment, including housing and automobiles, she said. It would pick up pace as rural demand gets steadier.

“The monsoon has been good this year, which will drive rural demand and there will be a pick-up in the rural credit in the second half of the current financial year,” she said. “Villages and semi-urban areas will be the next centre for growth.”

On the macroeconomic situation, she said the government had taken several initiatives and the benefits of these would be seen in a few months, with economic growth likely to pick up from here onwards. “I think the bottom (of the growth cycle) should be done with. From here on, it should start going up,” she said.

On CSR, she said, the bank had opened a skills’ training academy here to provide vocational training for youth from poorer families. Apart from Jaipur, such centres would be set up at Coimbatore, Chennai and Hyderabad, among other places, through the ICICI Foundation.

“The launch marks the next step in our strategy to promote inclusive growth in India...train 5,000 youth at nine centres across the country in the first year of operation,” she said, adding the aim was to train 15,000 youth across the country by 2016.