Every day, my inbox is inundated with junk mail telling me that I have won GBP 500,000 in the Coke sweepstakes, or that there is a Russian girl looking for real love, or that I could add inches or staying power, or that a Nigerian minister has undeclared millions sitting in some account and I could easily claim 20% of this booty.
While the last has been tempting; after all, who wouldn't want a few million dollars if all it involves is paying a few thousand dollars to facilitate the transaction and a trip to Nigeria to claim the money; I have more or less learned to ignore all of these messages.
Harder to ignore has been the recent spate of messages offering instant approval for unsecured personal loans for up to Rs 15 lakhs. What makes these hard to ignore is that they come from reputed financial corporations like Bajaj Fin and HDFC Bank.
I have always thought of HDFC as a conservative bank, one that was the most careful with their personal loans portfolio when others were going crazy doling out money in the heady days between 2005 and 2007. A number of those banks have had to take massive write downs on those portfolios when the music stopped in 2008.
I find it worrisome that someone seems to have found a place to plug-in the juke box again. This article in the Times of India on 29 April announced that HDFC bank will approve personal loans in 1 minute based on algorithms developed by the company. The article quotes their head of unsecured loans, Arvind Kapil as saying, "This is the first time that such lending will be possible without any bank official eyeballing the application form."
Apparently, 1 minute was way too long to approve a personal loan, for an article in the Business Standard yesterday says that they have launched a process to disburse personal loans in 10 seconds.
Isn't this how the financial crisis of 2008 began?
1 comment:
Banks.*Rolls eyes*.
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