Senior Relationship Manager

Role overview

This position sits within Aditya Birla Capital Limited’s housing finance business, Aditya Birla Housing Finance Limited (ABHFL), a company registered with the National Housing Bank under the National Housing Bank Act, 1987. ABHFL provides a broad set of housing finance solutions, including home loans, home improvement loans, home construction loans, balance transfer and top-up loans, loans against property, and construction finance. The company received its licence on 9 July 2014 and is pursuing ambitious growth plans.

ABHFL has expanded steadily and has maintained healthy asset quality despite difficult market conditions. The housing finance market is dominated by a few large groups, but segments such as affordable housing and self-employed borrowers offer strong growth potential. Even with greater participation from banks, housing finance companies continue to hold their share of the mortgage market. ABHFL aims to scale to 5X growth, reaching INR 40,000 crore in the next 5 years and entering the top 5 percentile of housing finance companies in the country.

The sales organisation serves three broad customer groups: retail customers, institutional customers, and builders. Retail customers contribute the largest share of business. Within client segments, salaried and self-employed customers have different needs and buying preferences.

Role purpose

The Construction Finance function supports developers with both short-term and long-term funding needs across projects in India. The product set includes construction finance against projects and structured finance against committed developer cash flows. The role is fully accountable for building relationships, structuring transactions, and managing the portfolio end to end.

This role requires a strong understanding of construction finance underwriting, where the evaluation is driven less by the balance sheet and more by the project, promoter group, and execution quality. Assessment includes the builder’s delivery history, timeliness, project saleability, relationships with other lenders, and the number of completed projects. Ongoing project monitoring and tracking end-use of funds are essential because of the risk of diversion and delayed repayment from sale receivables. Good market awareness and strong background research on clients are critical for prudent selection.

Mortgage lending covers a wide range of solutions, from standard home loans and loans against property to more complex structures such as lease rental discounting, commercial property purchase financing, and construction finance lending. These solutions are offered to self-employed professionals, self-employed non-professionals, and salaried borrowers across multiple lending programmes. Each programme is designed to assess repayment capability accurately before the company takes exposure.

Loan approval decisions involve a combination of profile checks, balance-sheet based lending, and collateral evaluation. The role also requires a deep understanding of the borrower’s business model, customer base, suppliers, success drivers, and dependencies, especially because these are long-tenure exposures that can run up to 15–20 years. Financial analysis is used to understand both near-term and long-term repayment capacity.

ABHFL serves buyers through housing finance, offers loan against property, commercial property purchase, lease rental discounting, and construction finance for builders. Because the business is largely retail-led, it involves a high volume of transactions and customer relationships. Performance depends heavily on people, processes, and operational efficiency, along with product quality, channel management, customer relationship management, and risk control.

What the role must achieve

• Develop and maintain strong builder relationships.
• Structure construction finance and related deals effectively.
• Manage the assigned portfolio with close attention to risk and performance.
• Assess developer projects, funding needs, and repayment sources.
• Monitor project progress and ensure funds are used appropriately.
• Use market intelligence and client insights to support sound credit decisions.
• Identify new business opportunities and help create differentiated market positioning.
• Support growth through innovative product and go-to-market approaches while protecting profitability and preventing delinquency.

Key challenges

This is a high-risk, high-return and secured lending business that is still volatile. The present construction finance portfolio is around 5% of the HFC book but contributes about 23% of the bottom line, making it strategically important for the overall retail home loan proposition and market competitiveness.

The number of borrowers may be limited, but the work demands strong relationship management because projects and clients need near-daily monitoring and weekly interactions. The business is geographically and customer-diverse, so the book cannot become overly concentrated in any one region or segment. Construction finance therefore requires onboarding smaller clients with the same intensity, diligence, and quality expected in large corporate lending.

Skills and qualifications

The position calls for strong builder relationship management, prior exposure to real estate debt or equity businesses, transaction structuring knowledge, good communication and presentation ability, a strong real estate market network, and a high orientation toward customer service.

The preferred academic and professional background is a postgraduate qualification with 4 to 8 years of experience in real estate lending.