Shriram eyes 15% growth in financial services business

Group says it will be watchful, not too aggressive during current fiscal

The Chennai-based Shriram group is targeting a growth of 15 per cent in its financial service businesses (with a net worth of  Rs 60,000 crore) during the current fiscal.

However, the group said it would be watchful and less aggressive in making fresh investments during the current fiscal citing weak economic conditions.

Arun Duggal, chairman of Shriram Capital Ltd, said: "Last fiscal had been a bit subdued. We had intentionally slowed down the business growth rate, though we grew reasonably well at around 15 per cent across all the verticals. We took advantage of this period to further strengthen our organisation, people and processes".

Indicating reasons for slowdown, he said, the slowdown in infrastructure sector impacted group's customers who were servicing the mining sector. Besides, other factors such as high interest rates, securitisation regulations, provisioning norms proposed for non banking finance company's (NBFCs) customers and some of the regulations which are yet to come into force have created uncertainty in the non banking financial sector, he added.

On the banking licence, he said, “we are quite interested to enter this space and our focus will be on the serving the middle-class segment.”