Like MMFSL, Bajaj Finance; but bearish on NBFCs overall: Tirthankar Patnaik

In a chat with ET Now, Tirthankar Patnaik, Director, Strategist-Institutional Research, Religare Capital Markets shares his views on NBFCs.

ET Now: Lot of market men are bullish on NBFCs and the underlying thought here is that NBFCs will gain at the cost of banks which currently are in no mood to lend to retail borrowers as they are worried about the quality of their balance sheet?

Tirthankar Patnaik: I would not be subscribing to that thesis. We like MMFSL, we like Bajaj Finance purely as standalone stocks. That argument does not push the argument for NBFCs as a class given that the top-down argument is very clear -- inflation remains fairly high and interest rates in this fiscal are likely to go up and are likely to remain high well into the next fiscal until we see some closure on inflation right now.

So, we will not like NBFCs as an asset class. We like housing and auto finance businesses which has very good penetration but not NBFCs really as an asset class.