RBI helps lenders tackle bad loans and other top Banking news of the day

Round up of the major headlines that dominated the Banking sector, nationally and internationally.

A tool provided by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to help lenders tackle bad debts is instead helping to camouflage the scale of the problem, evidence of how the country's banks will struggle to meet an ambitious clean-up target in 16 months' time. 

Exhorting bankers to stop being "paranoid" about Payments Banks, ICICI Bankchief Chanda Kochhar today said "disruption" will happen in the industry due to technology and not because of the entry of new entities in the market. 

State Bank of India, country's largest lender, has initiated a process to sell its stake in the National Stock Exchange, where it owns around 15%. 

Country's largest public sector lender State Bank of India (SBI) has set a target to advance Rs 500 crore home loans in 2015-16 in Odisha, said a senior bank official. 

The finance ministry is expected to kick-start the process of setting up the proposed Bank Board Bureau (BBB), the first step towards a holding company structure for state-run banks, by the end of this month. 

As the proposed Small Finance Banks (SFBs) scout for domestic equity to meet their regulatory requirement, a recent Reserve Bank of India (RBI) circular on alternative investment funds (AIF) could be a game changer. 

When Kakao Corp, operator of South Korea’s messaging app KakaoTalk, and KT Corp., the former state phone monopoly, got preliminary approvals to set up the nation’s first Internet-only banks on 29 November, it created history in Asian banking.