Banks turn cold to techies on loans

<div class="section1"><div class="Normal"><span style="" font-family:="" arial="">BANGALORE: A group of techies in Bangalore wanted to invest in a property and needed home loans. These software professionals decided to tap a nationalised bank as it was offering cheaper home loan. </span><br /><br /><span style="" font-family:="" arial="">To their surprise, the public sector bank was not keen on lending.The worry for the bank was not the legality of the documents or salaries. It was future career prospects of those techies. </span><br /><br /><span style="" font-family:="" arial="">The branch manager was worried that they would soon land up with an overseas job and become untraceable in the event of non-payment of EMIs.</span><br /><br /><span style="" font-family:="" arial="">The branch managers are not willing to go on record, but many are quietly adding techies to their hot list of borrowers. Many in the banking industry already have an internal hot list which includes advocates and journalists. </span><br /><br /><span style="" font-family:="" arial="">Of course, it''s not applicable to every one banks'' get overcautious when the borrower is from this community.</span><br /><br /><span style="" font-family:="" arial="">Again the cold treatment is not applicable to the employees of domestic biggies in the tech sector like Wipro and Infosys. </span><br /><br /><span style="" font-family:="" arial="">In fact, every bank tries hard to have a corporate tie up with these big corporates to give loans to their employees. The trouble comes when the prospective borrower is from a lesser known IT company. </span><br /><br /><span style="" font-family:="" arial="">In many cases borrowers working for small IT firms are asked to provide a long list of documents in the hope that they would get fed up with the banker. </span><br /><br /><span style="" font-family:="" arial="">"We exactly know what irritates them. Most tech employees are young and they don''t have the patience to make too many trips to the bank for a loan," says the manager of a PSU bank.</span><br /><br /><span style="" font-family:="" arial="">But why should banks turn away tech borrowers who are eligible for loans with big pay packets? Bankers complain that most software professionals land up with a overseas job very often and banks find it difficult to keep track of their loan repayments. </span><br /><br /><span style="" font-family:="" arial="">"In many cases, the entire family relocates and even if the borrower misses a couple of EMIs, it becomes NPA" says a source at Canara Bank.</span><br /><br /><span style="" font-family:="" arial="">And, a personal loan to an IT employee is a no for many public sector branch managers unless he draws his salary from the bank''s account. </span><br /><br /><span style="" font-family:="" arial="">"We give loans to only the employees of corporates with whom we have a corporate relationship" say bank sources. An employee working for a MNC was asked to pay up his personal loan dues as he had changed his job from Wipro. </span></div> </div>