The nation's largest lender State Bank of India (SBI) today said it does not see the bank's interest rates rising sharply in the next 2-3 months as credit offtake is usually low in the April-June quarter.
"There is still a fair amount of liquidity in the system so possibly during the next 2-3 months despite the upward bias there may not be much hiking of interest rate," SBI Chairman OP Bhatt told reporters here on the sidelines of a Defence programme.
Agreeing that there is an upside bias of interest rate at this momemt, Bhatt said it will not have much pressure on the interest rates as credit offtake is usually low in April-June quarter.
He noted that the current quarter "is relatively quiet in terms of credit offtake".
The SBI chief, however, said he would wait for the RBI monetary policy review on April 20 to decide on teaser home loans where interest rates are lower and of fixed value in initial years and turn floating in the remaining years.
SBI's offer of concessional first year loan at eight per cent interest rate is coming to end this month.
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"We will take a view at the end of this month and (look at) what the RBI monetary policy says," Bhatt added.
SBI currently offers home loans at 8 per cent under the special home loan scheme, but revised the rate for the second and the third years to 9 per cent from 8.5 per cent earlier.
The teaser rates have been a major issue in the home loan market in the recent past, with public sector lender SBI walking away with a big pie of the market through its own teaser rates.
A number of lenders, including HDFC, had followed SBI last year in offering teaser rates, but most of these offers were discontinued earlier this year in a rising interest rate scenario.