Inching closer to the culmination of the merger process of its NBFCs, the Shriram Group on Wednesday said Shriram Financial Ventures (Chennai) (SFVPL), which was the holding company of Shriram Capital (SCL), will become the promoter and holding company of the financial services and insurance businesses of the group after the merger. As announced earlier, SCL and Shriram City Union Finance will soon be merging with Shriram Transport Finance.
SFVPL is jointly owned by Shriram Ownership Trust (SOT) and Sanlam Group of South Africa. It will help each of its investee companies in the group to expand and grow while continuing to look for newer business opportunities in the financial services sector. The focus will be to drive growth using both technology and finance. DV Ravi, managing trustee of SOT and erstwhile MD of SCL, will be the vice chairman and MD of SFVPL.
Subhasri Sriram, who was the executive director and CFO of SCL, and NS Nanda Kishore, director and CEO of Novac Technology Solutions, will be the joint MDs. Subhasri Sriram comes with an expertise in finance, investor relations, entity structuring and new initiatives. Nanda Kishore specialises in technology, digital, synergy creation and new initiatives.
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DV Ravi said: “At a group level, we have completed a comprehensive exercise of simplifying the corporate structure and businesses under SFVPL. We will now be focusing on facilitating the growth in the NBFC and insurance space and also evaluate emerging opportunities and new initiatives in these domains.”
The board of SFVPL will comprise nominee directors, whole time directors, and independent directors, with KP Krishnan (retired IAS officer) as its independent director and non-executive chairman.
Shriram Group had in December last year announced the merger of Shriram Capital with Shriram City Union Finance and Shriram Transport Finance. The move is aimed at creating the country’s largest retail finance NBFC. The merger is to help the Shriram Group bring together all its lending products, commercial vehicles, two-wheeler loans, gold loans, personal loans, auto loans and small enterprise finance under a single umbrella which will be called Shriram Finance. The company has already received approvals from the NCLT, CCI and Irdai and looking for announcement of the completion of merger process by December. The group has kick-started cross-selling of products of the NBFCs as part of exercise for the smooth integration of process and procedures.
Shriram Group has an overall customer base in excess of 2.34 crore, over 1,00,000 employees across 4,150 branches and assets under management of more than Rs 2.25 trillion.
