A post-Covid recovery has powered Bank of Baroda’s Kerala zone to put up a strong performance in the fiscal fourth-quarter ended March 2023 amid growth in the lender’s loan book and improvement in asset quality.

The bank’s Kerala pocket churned out an 89% rise in net profit to Rs 426 crore in the three-month period ended March 2023. While the loan book showed strong growth on the retail and corporate side, recoveries from non-performing assets (NPAs) saw a surge.

“Controlling the NPAs and improving recoveries boosted our March quarter performance. Huge repayments from restructured accounts due to floods and Covid fell due during the quarter. Our bank staff conducted personal interactions with the borrowers. This went a long way in controlling fresh bad loan additions and repayments went smooth,” Bank of Baroda Kerala zone head Sreejith Kottarathil told Indianbankingnews.com.

Many of the non-resident Indians (NRIs) had lost their jobs during Covid and restructured accounts were coming up for repayment during the quarter. Loans were also restructured for those who were impacted by the floods in Kerala.

The gross NPAs at the end of the quarter stood at Rs 583.12 crore while the bank’s Kerala unit had recoveries of over Rs 91.49 crore.

Total advances grew 24.16% to Rs 17,960 crore during the quarter ended March 2023. Out of this, retail loans rose 24.26% to Rs 7,195 crore. While home loans grew 15.09% to Rs 3,820 crore, the gold loan book surged 30.46% to Rs 4,055 crore.  The corporate advances of the bank’s Kerala zone grew 29.59% to Rs 3,604 crore.

On the deposit front, the zone posted a growth of 11.90% to Rs 16,433 crore.

The total business grew 18% to Rs 34,393 crore.

“The retail and gold loans grew faster and helped us to reap higher interest income and profits. The biggest achievement of the zone, however, was in containing bad loan accretions,” Kottarathil said.

While credit growth improved, Kottarathil admitted that the size of the corporate loan book needs to scale up. “We are redrawing the strategy for corporate loan growth,” he said.

Interestingly, women officers head 49 of the 225 branches in the Kerala zone. About 971 out of 1,898 employees (51% of the staff) in the zone are women employees. 

Kerala zone topped the employee satisfaction survey which Bank of Baroda conducted on a pan-India basis.