Mumbai, Mar 14 (KNN)  In a move which can make obtaining loans more difficult, the Bank of Baroda is planning to shape up its credit intelligence gathering machinery by empanelling private agencies to provide credit opinion reports from any part of the world to the bank branches.

Bank of Baroda, a public sector bank, has a network of over 4725 branches spread all across the country.

The empanelled agency will provide reports about the debtor's ability to pay back the debt by making timely interest payments and of the likelihood of default.

The agency may rate the creditworthiness of the issuer of debt obligations, the debt instruments, and/or in some cases, the servicers of the underlying debt.

In this context, the Bank of Baroda has invited bids from agencies, with a minimum experience of seven years for obtaining credit opinion reports. 

The empanelled agency should be approved by ECGC or at least one nationalized bank and should be able to provide credit reports on entities abroad or in India within the given time frame.

Besides, the move comes in the wake of increasing and worrying level of NPAs and growing sickness in the small and medium enterprises.

The gap between demand and supply of bank credit for the MSME sector is a huge 56 per cent in the fiscal 2013-14 but may come down to 43 per cent in the coming years, as per the RBI projections done recently.

According to the report of the Private Sector Investment for MSME Sub Group under Working Group for the 12th Five Year Plan (2012-2017), the estimated outstanding credit demand and supply gap of MSMEs will be 56 per cent in 2013-14 at Rs 15,66,089 crore.

Meanwhile, in 2016-17 the gap will be of 43 per cent at Rs 16,33,111 crore. (KNN/SD)