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Bangladesh Bank (BB) plans to lessen pressure in dealing with mounting applications from struggling businesses seeking the central bank’s policy supports through shifting a portion of the matters to the commercial banks concerned.

As part of the pressure-relaxing recipe on the special committee to settle policy support-seeking matters, the banking regulator planned to transfer the decision-making responsibility onto the banks in respect to settle policy support appeals of the borrowers with outstanding loans within Tk 3.0 billion, sources at the BB said.

But the decisions regarding the businesses which were badly affected by reasons beyond their control with outstanding loans more than Tk 3.0 billion will be taken by the BB-formed five-member committee, the sources said.

Banking regulation and policy department (BRPD) of the central bank is likely to issues a circular soon with bringing necessary changes in its loan rescheduling and restructure-related master circular issued in 2022.

Seeking anonymity, a BB official said, the central bank planned to relax the pressure on the committee with shifting a part of the matters to the concerned commercial lenders to bring acceleration in settling appeals of the struggling businesses for regulators’ policy supports.

As part of the plan, the official said, the regulator would be given the responsibility to settle their struggling borrowers with outstanding loans within Tk 3.0 billion.

“A circular is likely to be issued very soon,” the central banker said, adding that the loan-rescheduling and restructuring-related master circular, which was issued in 2022, is set to be revised.

On condition of not disclosing identity, a member of the committee to deal policy support affairs, said they have been receiving too many applications from the businesses seeking policy supports.

“And the pressure keeps mounting, making it difficult for them to absorb it. We have so far been received around 1200 applications but we can only process 500 of them,” he said.

As the executives of the commercial banks have been requesting to get the decision-making authority of providing policy supports to their clients, the central bank may go for such pressure-easing move, according to him.

It is also known that the volume of down payment for getting such policy supports can be reduced while the grace period might be extended with an instruction to the borrowers to provide a portion of credit during the grace period so that banks can get some liquidity to pay the depositors.