Banks inundated with calls for relief as restrictions bite incomes

Banks have begun to receive calls and e-mails from their clients, mostly from small business owners, expressing grievances and requesting relief amid the new wave of lockdowns, as consumer traffic has waned significantly. 

The branch managers, who are mostly close to their clients in their regions, echoed these sentiments as say they get more calls from their clients expressing how difficult it is for them to service their facilities, as their business incomes have fallen to under a third of what they had before the new set of business and job-killing restrictions came in.

“Now, yesterday being a holiday, I got three calls from three clients, who are all small businesses in the retail trade, to tell me that how tough they find the current setting to service their loans, as they say they get no customers. Another one had sent me an e-mail asking for a payment deferment,” said a manager of a commercial bank branch in the city limits. 

Businesses, specially the small businesses, were barely coming off from more than a year of bad spell of business during the three months leading up to the new year holidays, before the authorities struck with the new restrictions, which gradually turned into a country-wide lockdown last weekend.

The restrictions on consumer activity will continue through May 31, as the public, sans the ones who are bound for essential services, is allowed only according to the final digit of their national identity card number.         

The virus-related restrictions have had a disproportionally high impact on the small business and low-income households than the big businesses and the salaried people, the data show. 

In fact, the big businesses consolidated their positions at the expense of the small businesses, which were going out of business due to both the virus-related restrictions and restrictions on imports. 

“I think there has to be another relief package for at least the small businesses, which saw their incomes being wiped off,” another suburban bank manager said, as he was getting a flood of calls requesting deferment of instalments. “They are not sure if these resections will get lifted by the end of this month and even if they do, that will take many months before they see the normal foot traffic in their stores or orders returning to normal levels,” he added. 

Banks were coming off stronger with high growths in loans and profits and lower non-performing loans, even after the expiry of the second round of moratoriums, as they were mostly looking past the pandemic, their interim results showed.