Axis Bank, India's third largest private sector bank, today announced the launch of a 'Lifetime Fixed' interest Home Loan scheme for affordable housing customers. The new product offers home buyers housing loans at a fixed rate of 10.40% p.a. for the entire duration of the loan i.e. up to 20 years. The offer is valid only for a limited period and is created specifically for the affordable housing customers with a loan size of upto Rs 50 lacs.
Home loan has been a key focus area for Axis Bank and is driving its overall retail lending business, which contributes 53% to overall lending book. The loan book size of Axis Bank stands at Rs 902.77 billion, as on Sept. 30, 2014 of which home loans constitute approximately Rs 480 billion.
Under this product, Axis Bank will offer home loans to both salaried as well as self-employed individuals. For salaried customers, the fixed rate of 10.40% is available on all Vanilla Home Loan offerings including Balance Transfer schemes and for the Self-Employed the loan is available at interest rates starting from 10.65% for similar variants.
Jairam Sridharan, president, retail lending & payments, Axis Bank said, ''Affordable housing customers are looking for stability and predictability of their EMIs, for budgeting purposes. So a product with fixed EMIs throughout its lifetime is very attractive to them. Starting at an interest rate of as low as 10.40%, this scheme is quite comparable to floating rate loans currently being offered in the market, making the scheme a very attractive proposition.''
Shares of the bank declined Rs 8, or 1.61%, to settle at Rs 488.65. The total volume of shares traded was 220,468 at the BSE (Tuesday).