Karur Vysya Bank has spent the past decade pruning its wholesale exposure and repairing asset quality. Under MD & CEO B. Ramesh Babu, the lender is now shifting strategy: it plans to scale corporate loans from 14% to 20% of its loan book over two years, marking a deliberate re-entry into a segment it had intentionally downsized to clean up NPAs.
The bank's growth push extends across four channels. It is targeting the affordable housing segment (₹20 lakh to ₹50 lakh ticket range) to improve yields, launching an in-house credit card business to capture high-margin retail spend and cross-sell to depositors, and scaling microloans through co-lending partnerships and business correspondents.
New niche retail products—loans against mutual funds are among them—sit alongside the microfinance push. Together, these moves reflect a calculus: yield expansion without reckless risk-taking. The strategy signals confidence that KVB's balance sheet is now clean enough to absorb higher-risk, higher-return segments.
Mid-sized private banks are no longer content to operate as regional deposit havens. By rebuilding corporate books with strict risk discipline while diversifying into higher-yield retail (credit cards, microfinance), KVB is directly challenging larger private-sector peers on product breadth and asset quality.
