Yes Bank is getting capital from a tech major: Ravneet Gill

This exercise will result in investors/s picking up the stakes above the regulatory cap and the RBI will have to take a call on a "non-conventional" investor coming on board soon.

Ravneet Gill, Chief Executive of Yes Bank, the private sector lender Yes Bank that is troubled right now is in its advanced stage of capital raising from various investors, including global tech majors, to grow its balance sheet that has been getting shrunk in the previous months.  

The mid-sized lender company has been moving through a series of troubles since the month of August last year when the RBI had refused to give the co-founder and chief executive Rana Kapoor a new term and instead asked him to leave the bank by January 31, 2019.

He took over the job in March 2019, discovered many shortcomings in the balance-sheet of Yes Bank, which had to be taken care of, resulting in the bank reporting its maiden losses in the quarter of March 2019. The balance sheet size has been reduced by 4 percentage points since then as a result of the same.

In an interview, Ravneet Gill said that the new investor/s is either going to be a strategic partner, for example, a tech major or a financial investor or a deep-pocketed family office.

A proper combination of the two is most probably going to enter the bank soon, he said, choosing not to disclose the exact targets or the timelines. When asked if it will be before the end of the fiscal year, he said that will be too late and the fund infusion will happen much sooner than that.

"The two things that we need to address is the single ownership for an equity holder and the second thing is, how comfortable would they (RBI) be with an unconventional/non- conventional investor coming into the bank," he added.