CreditAccess Grameen to raise $175 million overseas loans from DBS, Standard Chartered and others

Kolkata: India's largest microfinance company CreditAccess Grameen is in the process of mobisling $175 million loan from a host of overseas lenders including DBS Bank, The Korea Development Bank and Standard Chartered Bank.

The Bengaluru-based non-banking financial company-microfinance institution (NBFC-MFI) signed a pact towards this Monday.

The fund will be raised for an average 3.25 years at 6% rate. The coupon is pegged at 215 basis points over the secured overnight financing rate (SOFR), which is presently at 3.85%, a company official said. The company has to pay a hedging cost over this.


"While the current hedging costs have temporarily risen, the overall impact on our cost of borrowings is limited since this funding constitutes only 7% of our total borrowings," chief financial officer Nilesh Dalvi said.

The syndicated social loan facility will qualify as external commercial borrowing under the automatic route of the Reserve Bank of India, the company said.

Other overseas lenders for the loan include SBI (Mauritius) Ltd, BCP Bank (Mauritius) Ltd, Sri Lanka's Commercial Bank of Ceylon PLC and Sampath Bank PLC, UAE's Al Masraf, The National Bank of Ras Al Khaimah (P.S.C.), and Hong Kong's KEXIM Asia Ltd.

Standard Chartered Bank and DBS Bank acted as the joint mandated lead arrangers and bookrunners for the deal.

"We aim to raise 15-20% of our annual borrowing requirements through ECBs every year. Hence, this is a continual exercise required to diversify our liability profile. Since ECBs come with a longer tenure, it also helps us in strengthening our ALM (asset liability management) profile," Dalvi said.

CreditAccess mobilised $640 million overseas loans in the past five years. It currently holds around 24% of its liability profile in foreign borrowings.