Growth in Q1 driven by wealth management business, NBFCs: R Venkataraman of IIFL Group

In a chat with ET Now, R Venkataraman,MD of IIFL Group talks about company's healthy profit after tax (PAT) for IIFL in first quarter.

ET Now: The key highlights from the first quarter and what according to you led to this 28% PAT growth that you have clocked?
R Venkataraman: For the quarter ended June 30, 2016 our consolidated income rose to Rs 1030 crores which is up 13% on year-on-year basis and profit after tax rose to Rs 158.1 crores up 33% on an year-on-year basis that is before minority interest.
Now we also saw an improvement in our return on equity. Return on equity stood at about 18.4% for the quarter which was for the previous year at about 16.6%. This growth was primarily driven by growth in our NBFC business which consumer finance, loan assets under management grossed 16% on an year-on-year basis to reach Rs 18,559 crores.
The other factor for growth in this quarter was driven mainly by our wealth management business, total assets under our wealth management practice rose and reached about Rs 85,783 crores.

As the business of the group can be broadly categorised into three broad categories; which is consumer finance or NBFC where we do a retail oriented diversified products. The products include mortgages as well as gold loans, commercial vehicle finance, loan against capital market instruments and health care and SME finance. The other business which we do is wealth management.

We are one of India’s fastest and largest wealth managers in the country. The third business which we do is primarily related to broking which is more or less in stock markets, currency and commodity. So bulk of the growth has been broadly driven by the NBFC as well as the wealth management practice.

ET Now: Provisions and NPA have been mainly on back of a move to the DPD, how much additional stress do you see because of this move?
R Venkataraman: Actually if you look at our NIMS, our gross NPA has increased to about 1.97%, the net NPA has increased from 0.54 for the end of the last fiscal to about 0.91.

And as you rightly said this has been primarily driven by change in the NPA recognition norms from about 150 days to 120 days.

I think last year also we saw similar increase in the first quarter and then we managed to improve the asset quality simply by improving our collection efforts and this is the first quarter in the new regime of 150 to 120 days and we are invested in collections, we have a collections infrastructure in place and we hope to improve our collections efficiency as well as mechanism to make sure that these NPAs are kept under control.