YES Bank now to buy stressed assets

YES Bank, which almost collapsed two years ago from bad loans, is now on a hunt to buy stressed assets from other lenders.

A new partnership with US private-equity firm JC Flowers & Co. LLC allows it to buy soured loans of other banks, Prashant Kumar, chief executive officer of the Mumbai-based lender, said in an interview.

The so-called asset reconstruction company, that YES Bank will take a 19.99 per cent stake in, plans to hire as many as 100 people across legal, compliance and investment management over the next few months, he said.

“We are trying to create a credible platform which has the capability and capacity to buy stressed assets from other banks,” Kumar said, pointing to the bank’s experience in managing this area of the business. YES Bank agreed to sell Rs 48,000 crore ($5.9 billion) of a bad loan portfolio last month to JC Flowers’ ARC, a move Kumar said would help boost its profitability.