SBI face staff crunch, innumerable home loan applications pending

Recently State Bank of India (SBI), announced new home loan scheme in which it is offering 8% interest rate, after this since February SBI counters across country are receiving innumerable home loan applications. As per bank sources there is acute shortage of manpower in the bank’s loan processing centers due to huge number of loan applications are pending with the bank creating major dissatisfaction among the customers.

For instance in SBI’s Kolkata branch around 1000 home loan applications are pending for more than a fortnight even though bank had promised to sanction loan to the valid proposals with in a week.

The Bengal circle SBI officials have promised to take corrective measures to clear the pending application. For beginners SBI has planned to expand its loan processing desk to tide over the increasing flow of applications.

SBI chief general manager in Kolkata Jayanta Kumar Sinha told, “There are cases where customers had to wait longer than usual. This is primarily for two reasons. We took a long time to process a loan when we detected faults in the application. And there was also a gap in manpower”.

Mr Sinha said, “We plan to expand the loan processing desk as we expect the flow of application to double this year to 20,000”.

SBI officials, pointed out although the situation to some extent in all circles is similar, the problem is severe in Kolkata, as the demand of home loan in the city is high. Mr Sinha told, “Last year, we had received nearly 10,500 personal loan applications in Kolkata alone totalling Rs 688 crore. In terms of the number of applications, Kolkata was the highest in the country”. The bank is receiving around 60% of the home loan applications.

There are around 120 staffers in SBI’s retail asset central processing centre (RECPC) in Kolkata, which exclusively processes and sanctions retail loans received from the city people. But this appears to be inadequate in comparison to the flow of loan applications bank is receiving every day. There have been some cases for which bank have taken even more than 45-50 days for sanctioning home loans.

The bank sources say around 100 retail loan applications are received out of which approximately 60 are home loan applications.

Another senior SBI official acknowledges, “We have now geared up to process 100 applications every day. But there is a backlog of 840 applications”. On the other hand according to some sources working with the bank stated that over 1,200 loan cases are pending. But no official confirmation has been given by the bank about this.

SBI officials informed the high-value applications worth Rs 1 crore are given the priority and cleared first. There are few cases where valid applications were cleared after 45 days which were related to projects built by private promoters and where the ticket size is less than Rs 20,000.

Home loan processing is, more unwieldy, in comparison to education loans or car loans. “Home loans are offered for a longer period and so the processing job is a bit rigorous. We need to follow know your customer (KYC) guidelines on borrowers, for vendors and even on guarantors.”

Most of the banks do KYC verification by their own but SBI, out sources the legal verification to its 30-odd empanelled lawyers.