Understand how a bank actually makes money.
How a bank turns other people's deposits into profit, what the regulator forces it to hold, what bad loans do to the spread, and how you read the whole story off a handful of numbers. Mapped from cause to effect.
Reading paths
- 1Read in order
Start Here
A four-stop tour of the whole map — what a bank is made of, how it earns, what goes wrong, and how you read it all off a results deck. Fifteen minutes before you pick a deeper path.
- 2
The Spread Engine
How a bank actually makes money on lending — from the deposits it raises cheap to the loans it prices dear, and the margin sitting in between.
- The Bank Balance Sheet
- Why Branches Push CASA
- Cost of Funds
- Yield on Advances
- Net Interest Income
- Net Interest Margin
- 3Read in order
The Volume Side
Margin is only half the story. This is the other half — how fast the book grows on both sides, and the one ratio that keeps the two honest.
- 4
The Regulator's Grip
What RBI forces onto every bank's balance sheet — the rate it sets, the cash it locks away, and the loans it insists get made before the bank touches its own money.
- RBI & the Repo Rate
- Rate Transmission
- Cash Reserve Ratio
- Statutory Liquidity Ratio
- The Treasury Book
- Liquidity Coverage Ratio
- Priority Sector Lending
- 5
The NPA Lifecycle
A loan going bad, start to finish — from the first missed signal to the day it's written off the books.
- IRAC Norms
- SMA Stress Buckets
- What an NPA Is (the 90-Day Rule)
- Asset Classification (Standard → Loss)
- Provisioning
- Credit Cost
- Recovery & Write-offs
- 6
From Spread to Bottom Line
The full P&L, read top to bottom — how the spread and fee income build to operating profit, and what provisions leave behind as the number the results headline leads with.
- Net Interest Income
- Non-Interest Income
- Cost-to-Income Ratio
- Pre-Provision Operating Profit
- Provisioning
- Credit Cost
- Net Profit
- ROA / ROE
- 7
How the Bank Is Judged
Read any bank's results in five minutes. The seven-or-so numbers that tell you whether it funds itself cheaply, lends cleanly, runs lean, and stands safe — and which lever each one measures.
- Reading a Bank's Results
- Net Interest Margin
- CASA Ratio
- Gross & Net NPA Ratio
- Provision Coverage Ratio
- Cost-to-Income Ratio
- Net Profit
- ROA / ROE
- Capital Adequacy (CRAR)