Kalyan Kumar, MD and CEO, Central Bank of India
The Central Bank of India (CBoI) plans to rebalance its loan portfolio, which is currently focused on retail, agriculture and SME exposures, by stepping up lending to businesses.
RAM advances accounted for 71.5 percent of Public Sector Bank’s total advances (of ₹ 2,93,488 crore) at the end of September 2025, while corporate advances accounted for the rest (28.5 percent).
Kalyan Kumar, MD & CEO, noted that the mix of RAM and corporate loans in total loans will move towards 65:35 going forward.
He highlighted that the Bank has a healthy capital adequacy ratio (of 17.34 percent at end-September 2025) and plans to recruit around 1,000 loan officers to build the corporate loan portfolio in FY26.
“RAM progress is our strength. We are going to build on this… But in business development, we need to work sincerely and build capabilities. We have a very good team. But we need to actually give the customer confidence regarding timely decisions.”
“The message we want to give to our corporate clients is that we are also a player and want to assure them that decisions are made in a timely manner,” Kumar recently told analysts.
The CBoI chief attributed the relatively lower composition of corporate loans in the Bank’s overall portfolio to “obvious reasons”.
The Bank was placed under Rapid Corrective Action (PCA) framework for about five years from June 2017 due to high net non-performing assets and negative return on assets. The RBI took this step to ensure its sanity. CBoI emerged from PCA in September 2022.
Bigger role
Kumar underlined that his bank needs to play a bigger role in corporate lending to ensure strong interest income streams.
The CBoI chief noted that the composition of loans is not in the Bank’s favor as around 60 percent of loans are linked to the (external) repo benchmark.
While the benefit of the repo rate cuts has been immediately passed on to customers whose loans are linked to this benchmark, the repricing of deposit rates has been delayed.
And this difference, according to Kumar, has hit the Bank hard in terms of net interest margin (NIM), which fell by 52 basis points from 3.41 percent in September 2024 to 2.89 percent in September 2025.
Published on October 26, 2025
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