Working in a bank and NBFC is no different, thanks to regulatory scrutiny: Sudipto Roy, MD & CEO, L&T Finance

During the interview, Roy said that the company would not do big-ticket loans and will remain focused on retail loans. “Wholesale is more or less a closed business. Big wholesale loans, big-ticket loans, lumpy loans—we will not do it,” Roy said.

I didn’t feel any difference. You do the same products on the asset side. We do not manage people’s cash. In a way, NBFCs are like half a bank, on the asset side.

Working in a bank and working in an NBFC is no different because of the regulatory scrutiny, all upper-layer NBFCs are scrutinised as well as banks. The upper-layer NBFCs also conduct themselves like banks so, for me, there is absolutely no difference between a bank and an NBFC.

How do you want to position L&T Finance in the next three years?

We are trying to position ourselves as a digital first, digital native lender. If you are a good customer with a great credit standing, L&T Finance will give you the best loan. We want to position ourselves as a digital native lender which actually underwrites the customer holistically and gives the customer the best possible offers, much better than anyone else.

On the servicing side, we would probably work much better than many others because of service stack digitisation as well. Overall, we want to position ourselves as a standout digitally native NBFC, what we have originally defined as fintech at scale.

Fully native digital means digital in all our processes and systems. All our processes, whether its interacting with customers, collecting from customers, servicing our customers—there should not be a single piece of paper flowing around and it should be a completely digitised NBFC, and the term probably is digital native.