MUMBAI, 04 January 2022: National E-Repository Limited (NERL), an NCDEX group company and a WDRA (Warehousing Development and Regulatory Authority) regulated entity has facilitated loans worth more than INR 2000 crore against electronic Negotiable Warehouse Receipts (eNWR).
The first loan disbursed or pledge financed against eNWR on the NERL platform was in March 2018. NERL manages and facilitates the usage of eNWR – a digital form of Negotiable Warehouse Receipt across 13 states and 1 union territory. eNWR enables linkages to various electronic platforms like eNAM, NCDEX, NeML, etc. for trade. Currently, 40 National, Regional and local presence banks are offering loans against eNWR across the country.
Kedar Deshpande, MD & CEO, NERL said, “This milestone is a result of the collective efforts of all stakeholders of the WDRA-eNWR ecosystem.”
He further explained, “This will pave the way to bring liquidity/finance and trade at a warehouse level. The ecosystem has the potential to enable the Government to track the private stock available in the country and take informed decisions for market intervention. Meanwhile, Banks being a regulated entity (by RBI), would also prefer to work with WDRA regulated warehouses to reduce their credit risks, as the collateral that needs to be pledged is stored in these warehouses.”
This year regulators, banks and the Government encouraged the use of eNWRs for financing stored commodities in WDRA registered warehouses. eNWR is bringing liquidity and trade at a warehouse level for helping farmers, FPOs and other market intermediaries.
Currently, 28 percent of client accounts with NERL are Farmer/FPO accounts and approximately INR 87 crore worth of loans have been disbursed against eNWR to farmer/FPO accounts on the NERL platform.
The first pledge was financed against eNWR in March 2018. The first milestone of INR 1000 crore worth of loans was met in March 2021. However, the next significant milestone of INR 2000 crore has been achieved in January 2022, within 9 months.
NERL officially commenced its operations in 2017 and developed its in-house capabilities and technology for generating eNWRs under the regulation of WDRA. Following this, as per the SEBI directive, all NCDEX settlements were managed through eNWRs on the NERL platform.
WDRA has also made it mandatory for all its registered warehouses to issue any Negotiable Warehouse Receipts (NWRs) only in electronic form on the Repository systems. This has brought in a significant level of transparency and ease of doing business for the entire ecosystem.