The Federal Bank Limited

Ladies and gentlemen, good day and welcome to the Q4 FY24 earnings conference call of the Federal Bank Limited. As a reminder, all participant lines will be in the listen-only mode and there will be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the presentation concludes. Should you need any assistance during the conference call, please signal an operator by pressing star then zero on your touch-tone phone. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I now hand the conference over to Mr. Sauvik Roy, Head, Investor Relations, the Federal Bank Limited.

Thank you, and over to you, sir. Thank you, Father. Good evening to all of you, and welcome to our next call to discuss the results for the quarter that went by. I'm sure you all had a chance to go through the results, Dick, reviewed them well, and also heard our post-results press con in which our MD has probably answered a lot of questions already. We have had a strong year of performance and we have delivered on most of our aspirational return ratios with the right consistency on earnings while maintaining a very good balance sheet as well. During the year, we also maintained the right growth trajectory, if you have seen in our deck, of course, across all our focused business segments. We scaled up the branch network as we crossed the milestone of 1,500 branches, and that's almost a 10% increase in our network. We exited the year with an all-time high annual profit. Our total business crossed 4.6 lakh crore, and our balance sheet also crossed a milestone figure of 3 lakh crores. The last quarter in particular, as MD already mentioned during the press con, was operationally one of our strongest ever. Some of the numbers, as mentioned in the deck, we did give a call out there, had slight wrinkles due to a one-off impact on account of certain wage-related matters. I'm sure most of you have noticed that and, you know, made the right calculations already. Our margins did expand marginally, but it did. And our asset quality continues to remain pristine. With this, I'll hand over the call to our MD, Mr. Shyam Srinivasan, who's also joined by the entire senior team. Thank you. Thanks again for joining and over to you, sir.

Thanks, Shauvik. Good afternoon, everybody. I think Shauvik mentioned the high points of the financial outcome. I just draw our attention or take us back to March 23, when we had our investor and spoke about our outlook and our aspirations over the two, three year period. And one of them was to ensure, if you all recall, or many of you may recall, we talked about the three ends that are non-negotiable. One is around NPS improvement. Second is around the NPA being best in class. And the third is accretion in net worth. And those are obviously driven outcomes, but driven by meaningful improvement in our return ratios. So I'm happy that in FY24, along those lines, we did deliver. While Q4 reported net profit is 906, it did have the one-off impact of the pension effect of about 160 odd crores. So barring that, I think the quarter was quite a long predicted line. Growth has been consistently good. Expansion in the margin is beginning to trickle through, even though the cost of deposits remains elevated.