CIBIL , India’s premier credit bureau, has become a game changer for retail credit – the backbone of high-quality retail growth. CIBIL is probably one of the less-appreciated success stories of India’s financial sector evolution. It is today, probably the back-bone of the relatively high-quality and disciplined retail credit build out in India.
Satish Pillai, COO of CIBIL has shared some interesting insights, CIBIL has 160m credit accounts (300m product accounts). 90% of new retail credits are backed by credit scores from CIBIL. It’s adding 4m new accounts every month – of which 30% are new accounts. Almost all key financial sector participants are contributing and using data from CIBIL. It gained momentum and customer acceptance after 2007, when there was a retail credit crisis in the Indian market – has not looked back since. CIBIL offers credit scores / Analytics – almost all participants use it, and typically overlay their own analytics on it. CIBIL also has 6m accounts in commercial credit.
Potential for Credit Report Market in India
The total growth potential/market size is all adults in India – which can go up to 900m. The ‘Aaadhar Card’ should be a big driver of growth. The retail credit bureau has been well adopted by participants (almost all): across private, government and foreign banks.
Retail Asset Quality Strong, Defaulters Beware
They do not see any real credit quality pressures in retail assets – across the product pipeline. This has been the case for the last two years. There is some pressure in Commercial vehicles – and newer vintage loans are also showing pressure. Effectively, it’s a relatively hard market to call. There is some difference in the quality of assets between govt and private banks…govt is weaker – in car and education loans.