Spandana Sphoorty Fin to Cross Rs 15,000 Cr AUM by FY25

Mumbai, Dec 12 (PTI) Leading microfinance player Spandana Sphoorty Financial is hopeful of meeting its FY25 target of crossing Rs 15,000 crore AUM as it has already crossed Rs 10,000 crore till November.

The Hyderabad-based company had an AUM of Rs 9,784 crore as of September this year, up from Rs 5,782 crore in the year-ago period. It has earned Rs 152 crore in net income, which rose nearly threefold from Rs 55 crore.

The company, 48 per cent owned by Kedara Capital, has over the years invested close to Rs 630 crore into the company. It had been in trouble for some time and got new management led by chief executive Shalabh Saxena from Bharat Financial in the middle of the last fiscal when its AUM stood at 6,270 crore.

Saxena had given a three-year growth vision ending FY25, which set Rs 15,000 crore AUM target and close this fiscal with around Rs 12,000 crore of AUM.

"We are on course to meet the FY25 target of growing the AUM to Rs 15,000 crore as we have already crossed the Rs 10,000 crore AUM mark last month.

"Given this, we have just submitted an FY28 target, wherein we want to grow much larger with an AUM of Rs 28,000 crore, of which around Rs 25,000 crore should be our MFI book and the rest coming from our MBFC (Chris Capital) book, which consists of loan against property and SME finding," Saxena and the company's chief financial officer Ashish Damani told reporters here Tuesday.

On the profitability target, the officials said instead of net income, they have set a return on assets target of 4.5 per cent by FY28 but did not share the same for FY25.

Saxena said after the Reserve Bank tightened the credit appraisal norms and core capital requirements for unsecured lending by 25 percentage points, their loan application rejections have crossed 30 per cent of the total applications.

Going forward, the company will continue to stick to the joint liability group model of lending and wants to take the weekly payment to 75 per cent of all loans, up from around 50 per cent now, Saxena noted.

As of September 2023, its gross bad loans stood at 1.4 per cent and net bad loans at 0.42 per cent.

Spandana was started as an NGO in 1998 in Guntur in the then undivided Andhra Pradesh and converted to an NBFC in 2004. In 2015, it transformed into an NBFC-MFI.