C1 India would once again be offering its Forward e-Auction services to the country’s largest lender and BFSI giant, State Bank of India (SBI), in holding a mega e-auction of the bank’s stressed assets worth 1300 Crores on June 12. We had conducted a similar mega e-auction for SBI on March 14. The earlier mega auction was SBI’s maiden attempt in which 300 commercial and residential properties worth 1200 crores were up for bidding. 130 properties were successfully sold with the bank realising about 100 crores. This time, the bank looks to further reduce its bad debts by auctioning 250 commercial properties and 230 residential properties across 50 different cities including Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kanpur, Dehradun, Bhubaneshwar, Lucknow among others. These 480 distressed assets include offices, apartments, shops and factories, the details of which have been put up on https://www.bankeauctions.com which is the bank e-auctioning portal of C1 India.

As on December 2014, the Non Performing Assets of banks in the country amounted to 3,00,611 Cr. For long the government has been putting pressure on public sector banks to take urgent steps to recover dues from non-performing assets. Earlier in May, SBI chairman Arundhati Bhattacharya had made her intentions clear to contain bad loans by holding e-auctions of distressed assets every quarter.

Recommended Read: Beginners Guide to Bidding in Bank e-Auctions

E-auctioning in banking sector has a lot of advantages over the regular offline method as it brings absolute transparency and speeds up the auctioning process. Through C1 India’s e-auctioning portal, banks also get to reach a wider audience. It provides the banks a platform to recover dues from distressed assets. After the last mega e-auction, SBI’s gross NPAs improved for the March quarter improved to 4.25% from 4.95% during the same period last year. Net NPAs also registered an improvement from 2.57% to 2.12 %