NBFCs to maintain tier-one CAR of 12% by April’14: RBI

13 Dec 2012 Evaluate

With the opposition party and government reportedly reaching an agreement on passing the Banking Regulation Amendment bill, the companies that were keen on banking licence may see the light of the day. Though, the government has been pushing the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to issue a few bank licenses to corporate houses, but the central bank has been holding back on the grounds that the government should firstly pass the Banking Regulation Act 2012 for giving more powers to the central bank.

The new Banking Regulation Bill raises hopes for Non-Banking Finance Companies (NBFCs) along with new regulatory challenges. Based on the recommendations of a committee headed by Usha Thorat, RBI has issued new prudential norms. The new norms require NBFCs to have a tier-one capital adequacy ratio (CAR) of 12% by April 2014 as against the present tier-I requirement of 7.5% for NBFCs except those in infrastructure where CAR is 10% and for those NBFCs who is lending against gold CAR is already 12%.

As per the new norms, NBFCs will also have to adhere to the same norms as banks for classifying an advance as a bad loan. At present, if a borrower of NBFCs does not repay a loan for 180 to 360 days, the advance has to be classified as a bad loan compared to 90 days for banks. Further, the asset classification and provisioning norms should, in a phased manner, be made similar to that of banks for all registered NBFCs irrespective of size. Moreover, the implementation will also be done in phases like 120-day norm shall be applied from April 01, 2014 to March 31, 2015; 90-day norm thereafter and a one-time adjustment of the repayment schedule shall not amount to restructuring.

The New Banking Regulation Amendment bill will give RBI the power to replace bank boards. It will also allow the central bank to check the books of conglomerates that a bank have in their group. Once the amendments in banking bill gets passed in the cabinet, then any potentially large investor will have to take the permission of the RBI before buying shares of the bank.

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