SBI chairman C S Setty recently discussed the challenges faced by banks in lending to emerging sectors such as green energy and battery storage. Despite years of infrastructure financing experience, banks are still lacking in expertise for these new areas, the chairman said. He mentioned that past corporate lending excesses led to a surge in non-performing assets (NPAs), pushing banks towards personal loans due to difficulties in lending to small businesses and retail. "While we expect much of the capital to come from overseas and support domestic capital formation, universal banks - particularly large ones like SBI - are expected to play a role in infrastructure financing. Despite our years of expertise in project financing, the skill set required to assess emerging areas is still lacking. One idea is to establish a center of excellence focused on these areas, in collaboration with multilateral development banks and large MNC banks. We are working on that," said Setty. He highlighted the need for banks to develop new skills for assessing new business sectors. This is particularly important as the banking sector aims to contribute effectively to the financing of infrastructure projects.