Housing Development Finance Corp. (HDFC) has received several bids for a stake sale in education loan subsidiary HDFC Credila Financial Services, a senior executive said on Thursday.
The mortgage lender needs to pare its stake in HDFC Credila to 10% over the next two years, and stop onboarding new customers, as per a Reserve Bank of India (RBI) directive for its merger with HDFC Bank.
“We have already announced that we are willing to look at reducing our stake in the company from 100% to 10% and a variety of people are calling and making bids and we are still collating all that,” said Keki Mistry, vice-chairman and chief executive, HDFC.
Mistry said HDFC would engage with RBI to try and resolve the issue around onboarding new customers.
“To my mind, it can be done in the next couple of months because we have received a lot of bids and hopefully by the end of June, we will be able to arrive at some finality on how to close this, theoretically assuming there is no extension from RBI on onboarding new customers,” said Mistry.
Mint reported on 25 April that HDFC will make a representation to RBI to let HDFC Credila continue signing up customers till it finds a buyer. The report said that the mortgage lender has been trying to sell its stake in Credila over the last year and while it had received interest from large private equity players and sovereign funds, talks were put on hold since it was awaiting clarity from RBI on the merger.
Meanwhile, VC Circle said in a report on 2 May that HDFC has picked Jefferies Financial Group Inc to manage the sale of Credila and could seek a value of as much as $1 billion.
