SBI signs USD 300 mn loan agreement with KfW for rural lending

Nation's largest lender State Bank of India and the German development bank KfW today signed a USD 300 million loan agreement to support rural and micro-enterprise lending in the country.
With a focus on agricultural and microenterprise loans, the facility is designed to further strengthen and extend SBI's priority sector lending activities, the bank said.
"We are glad that KfW has chosen us as its partner to foster a focused growth in agriculture sector where we are already a market leader with more than 20 per cent of the market share," SBI's managing director V G Kannan said.
SBI will be onlending these funds to underserved sectors, thereby contributing to the generation of growth, employment and income, it said in a statement.

KfW director general (Europe and Asia) Roland Siller said, "Joining hands with India's largest bank provides an unprecedented opportunity to translate that objective into reality."
The loan has a maturity of 15 years.
The entire process of fund raising was facilitated by SBI's subsidiary, SBI Capital Markets.