The reduction in base rate, effective today, is going to bring relief for nearly 80 lakh customers of the bank whose loans are still linked to the base rate and not the marginal cost of funds-based lending rates (MCLR).
Flushed with excess liquidity, SBI had announced processing fee waiver for auto and home loans late August. In fact, since last fiscal, and especially after the November 2016 note-ban, all the banks have been saddled with excess liquidity amidst continuing degrowth in industrial credit.
"We've decided to extend the ongoing waiver on home loan processing fees till March 31, 2018 for new customers and others looking to switch their existing loans to us," SBI said in a statement today.
Managing director for retail and digital banking P K Gupta said that with stability returning to the realty space after the implementation of the Real Estate Act (Rera), he sees lots of demand for home loans going ahead.
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The bank revised down the base rate to 8.65 per cent for existing customers from 8.95 per cent, while the BPLR (benchmark prime lending rate) is down from 13.70 per cent to 13.40 per cent.
"We had done the rate review in the last week of December, and based on whatever deposits rates we had, our base rate was brought down by 30 basis points to 8.65 per cent now," Gupta said.
The move is going to give nearly 80 lakh customers of SBI who on the old lending rate regimes and have not moved to MCLR. Banks review MCLR on a monthly basis, while the base rate revision happens once a quarter.
Due to weak transmission of policy rate by banks under the base rate system, the Reserve Bank had introduced the MCLR from April 1, 2016.
With the banks not fully passing on the rate cuts that the central bank has done in the past two years, the regulator is not happy even with the base rate regime and has mooted an external benchmark to better reflect market realities and speedier transmission.
Gupta said the current revision of base rate will ensure transmission of the policy rate cuts in the recent past.