Mr Iqbal Singh will be taking over as CEO and President of GE Money India from February 1, said GE Money India is surveying for a strategic partner for its wholly-owned personal loans and mortgage businesses.
“My priority would be to find a strategic partner for personal loan and mortgage businesses so that it would fit in with our rest of the model. I also want to look for new opportunities for growth. It may look from outside that we are selling off and getting out. I won’t be coming here to India if we are looking to completely exit these businesses”, Mr Singh told Business Line here today.
Mr Singh the newly appointed CEO said that GE Money India is even prepared to give up calculated interest on the wholly owned personal loans and mortgage businesses to the identified strategic partner if a strong brand, good customer base, distribution and products are brought to the partnership.
Before becoming a CEO and President of GE Money India, Mr Singh was Chief Marketing Officer for GE Money Asia and CEO of the Singapore business. In India, Mr Singh will be replacing Mr Vishal Pandit who has now decided to pursue opportunities outside GE.
On his new role, as CEO and President of GE Mr Singh said that he was “pretty excited about India” given its growth trends. “We think the future is here. We want to invest in India and want to grow. We have a great platform of businesses in place. We need to see how we can up the scale in terms of momentum and get to scale much faster than we had originally hoped”, he said.
Speaking about the partnerships Mr Sing said they are really moving ahead. He said that such partnerships in various markets including Korea, Indonesia, Turkey, Latin America and India will create the synergies that work well for GE Money.
“Increasingly, we are looking at partnerships as the way to go. In a way this is not new to us. We would tie up with large retailer groups and launch finance program or cards under their name. Those were more in the nature of a programme. We have now taken it to the next level where we are actually running the partnerships. That’s the way we see us growing. In the same way, we don’t want to keep GE Financial Services in India as standalone. We are looking for strategic partner that would help it to scale,” he said.
In India GE Money is already having partners the State Bank of India (credit card joint venture) and Wizard (home loans). A Memorandum of Understanding has also been signed between GE India and LIC of India.
According to Mr Singh mortgages and credit cards are the big growth drivers of GE Money India in the coming years.
Thursday, 31 January 2008
Thursday, 24 January 2008
PSU banks plan to give soft loans to newly TRPs
A few state-owned banks are functioning on a scheme to give soft loans to newly-minted tax return preparers (TRPs) for buying office equipment such as personal computers to help them start business in the current assessment year.
“The loan scheme would be normal commercial transactions with much easier terms,” said a finance ministry official. Details on loan costs were not available, but state-owned banks currently offer education loans of up to Rs5 lakh at interest rates between 11% and 11.5%. Banks started working on the loan scheme after industry body Indian Banks’ Association agreed to the finance ministry’s request to help TRPs, the official added.
TRPs will be unique as they will receive a financial incentive from the income-tax department to bring in new tax assesses, this is the first time in the department’s history that outsiders will be paid for widening the tax base.
At present, 3,545 people have qualified as TRPs. As many as 1,254 people who have got TRP training, but were not able to clear the final test in the first around, will get another chance for the test soon, the official said.
The training program for TRPs was completely funded by the government, which held a qualifying exam last year to shortlist people for the training. The income-tax department will formulate a strategy to constantly monitor the quality of work done by TRPs.
Work on the TRP scheme started sincerely after finance minister P. Chidambaram, during his Budget 2006 speech, said it would be introduced.
Generally individual taxpayers take help form Chartered accountants (CAs) to file their income-tax returns if they choose not to do it on their own.
But the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) is not happy with the TRP scheme. It has requested the income-tax department to take a re look at the scheme. Ved Jain, the institute’s vice-president said that ICAI feels that only CAs are capable and have requisite skills to handle tax returns. TRPs, unlike CAs, can not be allowed to take up statutory audits such as the ones that are needed to be filed by companies. In addition, the income-tax department has restricted TRPs’ probable client base and limited the fees they can charge.
A TRP will not be able to file the return of anyone with an annual taxable income above Rs3,00,000 and their fee has been capped at Rs250. The government, however, has tried to encourage TRPs to widen the tax base by giving incentives that exceed Rs250 in the event they file returns on behalf of a first-time assesses. Every addition to the tax base of about 3.27 crore assesses (end-March, 2006) through a TRP will result in an incentive of 3% of the tax return, subject to a ceiling of Rs1,000.
Once a new assesses files a return for the first time, he/she is likely to continue filing returns annually. This will help the income-tax department write off the relatively high initial expenses over a long period and keep the tax collection costs in line with the average.
Last year the finance minister said the cost of tax collection in India is 0.67% of the total tax collected, it is lowest in the world.
“The loan scheme would be normal commercial transactions with much easier terms,” said a finance ministry official. Details on loan costs were not available, but state-owned banks currently offer education loans of up to Rs5 lakh at interest rates between 11% and 11.5%. Banks started working on the loan scheme after industry body Indian Banks’ Association agreed to the finance ministry’s request to help TRPs, the official added.
TRPs will be unique as they will receive a financial incentive from the income-tax department to bring in new tax assesses, this is the first time in the department’s history that outsiders will be paid for widening the tax base.
At present, 3,545 people have qualified as TRPs. As many as 1,254 people who have got TRP training, but were not able to clear the final test in the first around, will get another chance for the test soon, the official said.
The training program for TRPs was completely funded by the government, which held a qualifying exam last year to shortlist people for the training. The income-tax department will formulate a strategy to constantly monitor the quality of work done by TRPs.
Work on the TRP scheme started sincerely after finance minister P. Chidambaram, during his Budget 2006 speech, said it would be introduced.
Generally individual taxpayers take help form Chartered accountants (CAs) to file their income-tax returns if they choose not to do it on their own.
But the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) is not happy with the TRP scheme. It has requested the income-tax department to take a re look at the scheme. Ved Jain, the institute’s vice-president said that ICAI feels that only CAs are capable and have requisite skills to handle tax returns. TRPs, unlike CAs, can not be allowed to take up statutory audits such as the ones that are needed to be filed by companies. In addition, the income-tax department has restricted TRPs’ probable client base and limited the fees they can charge.
A TRP will not be able to file the return of anyone with an annual taxable income above Rs3,00,000 and their fee has been capped at Rs250. The government, however, has tried to encourage TRPs to widen the tax base by giving incentives that exceed Rs250 in the event they file returns on behalf of a first-time assesses. Every addition to the tax base of about 3.27 crore assesses (end-March, 2006) through a TRP will result in an incentive of 3% of the tax return, subject to a ceiling of Rs1,000.
Once a new assesses files a return for the first time, he/she is likely to continue filing returns annually. This will help the income-tax department write off the relatively high initial expenses over a long period and keep the tax collection costs in line with the average.
Last year the finance minister said the cost of tax collection in India is 0.67% of the total tax collected, it is lowest in the world.
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