RHB eyes 11% growth in retail loans this year
KUALA LUMPUR: RHB Bank Bhd is aggressively targeting for a 11% growth in retail loans for 2018, against the 8.9% achieved last year, in line with efforts to increase its retail portfolio as part of a fiveyear strategy roadmap known as FIT 22.
RHB acting head of group retail banking Nazri Othman said the focus will be on products such as mortgage, personal loans, unit trust financing and credit cards to achieve this target.
“Retail asset size within the bank is about 46% of total loan,” he told reporters at the media launch of the RHB & RinggitPlus.com credit card Xpress Application via ChatBot event last Friday.
As at December 2017, the group’s total retail asset size stood at RM76 billion. Nazri said that the segment has contributed quite substantially to the bank’s total loan growth, citing that the loan growth achieved by the retail segment was over 8%, against the 3% achieved by the bank as a whole.
RHB unveiled the five-year roadmap recently, which entails the strengthening of Malaysia as its core market, focusing on its strengths overseas as well as exploring partnerships to build award-winning operating models as part of its agenda.
“We need to ensure that what we do augurs well with the FIT 22 objective. One of the objective is to increase the retail portfolio within the bank and we are now taking efforts to do that. One of the ways to do it is through partnering with people like RinggitPlus to offer our products and services to customers out there and this is something we are pursuing very hard on,” he said.
As for credit cards, the bank is expecting a 40% increase from the total number of cards issued last year. Its total credit card customer base stands at close to 500,000.
In September, RHB and RinggitPlus introduced ChatBot, a real-time messenger-style platform to facilitate personal loan application. Credit card applications is the second service offered by the bank to go through the platform.
In the first year of service roll-out for credit card application, RHB expects 5% of total credit card issuance, which equates to between 6,000 and 7,000 cards, to go through the ChatBot platform.
The platform enables customers to complete their application online within five minutes. All applications and documents will be processed online and customers are required to collect their credit card at the nearest RHB branch upon approval.
As at Thursday, the total personal loans disbursed from some 2,500 approved applications, made through the ChatBot system stood at RM25 million.
Nazri said while the bank has maintained the ChatBot and nonChatBot application channels, customers appear to be gravitating towards the ChatBot channel due to its seamlessness. Since the roll-out, about 95% of personal loan applications were made through ChatBot.