SCB wants to expand its SME customer base to one-third of its total loan portfolio by 2020, and the bank acknowledges that housing loans could be a channel to acquire small and medium-sized enterprises as customers.

Housing loans are no longer just a financial product under the new vision but could be a channel to other financial services, including transactions or cash management, she said.

The bank is considering combining credit and non-credit sales of residential projects that are the bank’s partners.

Providing financial advice to customers will help reduce the mortgage-rejection rate, which the bank has tried to maintain at 25 per cent this year because it has to help its developer partners sell homes. However, this does not mean it will relax its lending criteria.

Pikul said SCB had told developers that it had few problems with salaried people, but when dealing with the self-employed, it would scrutinise their ability to make their mortgage payments. Therefore, the bank’s sales staff needed to understand the nature of such customers’ businesses and income structures, and had to be financial consultants as well as salespeople. This year, SCB will use different early-warning systems for salaried customers and the self-employed. These should help the bank predict the likelihood of a loan turning bad in the future.

A similar system will also be used for auto-loan customers, she said.

Meanwhile, SCB is implementing a new digital platform to help make residential developers’ sales more efficient by using databases in each area.

“We must know how many projects are [for example] on Rama V Road and how many units are |sold to customers of SCB and how many sales there are per month,” she said.

SCB has observed that some wealthy people looking at housing as an investment preferred to pay cash, and the bank found that around 60 per cent of condominium buyers did not take out mortgages.

The overall housing loans in the banking industry this year are expected to register flat growth, she said.

Commercial banks last year recorded new housing loans of Bt600 billion, with SCB accounting for Bt115 billion.

Pikul said the bank had maintained a new-housing-loan target of Bt115 billion this year, and net loans are expected to reach |Bt25 billion, so outstanding loans this year should touch Bt600 billion.

Mortgage lending is expected to become more active in April because it is the end of housing transfers under the government’s stimulus scheme.

Ten major property developers have told the bank that their transfers year to date had dropped by 20 per cent compared with the same period of 2015.