Catholic Syrian Bank plans to raise Rs 500 cr from captal market before Dec 2015

The bank has submitted a panel of candidates for CEO to RBI and its response is awaited

 

Kerala-based private sector lender Catholic Syrian Bank (CSB) is planning to raise around Rs 400-500 crore from the capital market during 2015. The lender's proposed IPO is to support its growth plan, according to a senior official from the Bank.

S Santhanakrishnan, chairman, Catholic Syrian Bank said that the bank is in the process of preparing and filing Draft Red Herring Prospectus with SEBI and the IPO will be hitting the market this year.

"We are looking at raising around Rs 400-500 crore and we propose to have the listing in order to broaden the shareholder base and to have easy access to the capital market to support our business growth," he said.

The bank's existing networth currently is around Rs 800 crore and authorised capital is Rs 120 crore of equity shares and there is no preference share capital.

While declining to share any guidance for the growth, Santhanakrishnan said after the public issue bank's growth will be reasonably good and it will grow more than the industry average since the bank "has no advantage of not having too much of baggage".

The bank has clocked deposits to the tune of Rs 14,151 crore during the current fiscal (till February 2015) as compared to Rs 13,673.66 crore in 2013-14 and gross advances stood at Rs 9,590.71 crore as compared to Rs 8,896.82 crore.

Santhanakrishnan said the industry is going through some difficult movement because of the high NPAs and CSB is not different from any other bank. Most of the banks are more or less got some difficulty and in CSB case because of the low capital base, stress could be felt higher but it is not such a big problem.

The bank decided to reduce corporate advance and to focus more on SME and retail, which contributes nearly 40 per cent of the advances and the management decided to increase it to 60-70 per cent.

When queried whether the bank has identified replacement for Rakesh Bhatia, who resigned as CEO in January, he said the bank had submitted a panel of candidates to RBI and its response is awaited.