Smartly Cautious India Handling Credit with Care : BankBazaar Moneymood 2020 Report

• Demand for large home loans sluggish; share of home loans under Rs. 30L grows to 72% of total applications

Mumbai, India, January 13, 2020 : BankBazaar, India’s leading online marketplace for financial products, launched the second edition of ‘BankBazaar Moneymood 2020’. It is a review of credit purchase trends in India in 2019 and presents the outlook for 2020. As per the report, despite the slowdown, instead of putting their major life goals on hold, Indians are achieving them by being smartly cautious in taking credit.

The demand for high-value loans has been sluggish, though the number of people opting for loans of lower ticket sizes continued to increase. In the home loan segment, contribution of home loans under Rs. 30L has increased to 72% of the total number of applications. This spurt has been fuelled largely by first-time home buyers. While there has been a significant dip in the highest car loan ticket size, the average car loan ticket size remains steady.

The divide between metros and non-metros is also dwindling when it comes to credit products. In case of personal loans, the average personal loan ticket size was Rs. 2.61 lakh in metros and Rs. 2.79 lakh for non-metros. Similarly, for car loans, the average metro car loan ticket size was 5.7 lakh while the average non-metro car loan ticket size was Rs. 5.5 lakh.

When it comes to cards, Indians are increasingly becoming “credit card pros” with an eye on maximizing card benefits and enjoying exclusive lifestyle privileges. Consumers increasingly turned to the diverse benefits offered by premium cards, which showed a 30% growth across the board. Millennials between the age of 26 and 35 were the primary drivers, and there was a 43.38% growth in applications in this segment.

Women applicants continued to come out strongly in all categories, be it loans or credit cards. The gap between the average personal ticket size for women (Rs. 2.55 lakh) and men (Rs. 2.67 lakh) was low, while in case of home loans, the average ticket size for women (Rs. 25.64 lakh) continued to be higher than men (Rs. 23.72 lakh). Women also were the prime consumers for credit cards, and the number of women applicants for fuel, premium, and travel cards grew by 49.07%, 32.78%, and 21.99% respectively.

Adhil Shetty, CEO, BankBazaar said“The biggest revelation of this year’s Moneymood® has been the average Indian’s penchant for getting the best deal. The slowdown in the market has made the average consumer cautious about how they invest in assets and lifestyle, and the financial products they use for these purposes. This makes the role of neutral marketplaces like BankBazaar even more critical in the coming days as we provide the widest platform to help customers take a well-informed purchase decision. We’ll be right there with them, doing our bit to ensure smooth access to the right financial product, paperlessly, with new-age solutions like Video KYC.”

Moneymood 2020 is the second edition of BankBazaar’s annual report that highlights how different credit products such as personal loans, home loans, car loans, credit cards, etc., have fared across the last one year. The report, generated in-house by BankBazaar, has been compiled after analysing internal company data generated from over 322 million visits to BankBazaar’s website in 2019. It presents an accurate picture of India’s personal finance market in the year gone by and gives an idea of what to expect in the coming year. Trends are segregated based on metros & non-metros, gender and age.

Speaking about the study, Aparna Mahesh, CMO, BankBazaar, said, “There has always been a need to understand the personal finance market in India better, and as the largest marketplace for personal finance products in India, we realised that there’s practically no one else who has such a clear view into what is happening in this space. Last year’s report carried several predictions basis our insights on how 2019 would pan out. Moneymood® 2020 shows that all those forecasts around housing & auto sectors and credit card usage have been proven beyond doubt.”

You can download the report here : BankBazaar Moneymood 2020