Indiabulls Housing Finance on Friday said the company will hold 15 percent stake in OakNorth, a commercial bank in the UK, after Japan's Softbank agreed to invest Rs 2,800 crore of equity capital.

Currently, the company holds around 19 percent in OakNorth, which was seeded by Indiabulls Housing in October 2015 with Rs 650 crore to own a 40 percent controlling stake in the bank. The bank has no physical branches.

In an interview to CNBC-TV18, Ajit Kumar Mittal, executive director, said, "The bank would be valued at upward of two billion pounds, roughly $2.7-2.8 billion. So based on that, Indiabulls stake simply going by the price at which SoftBank invested and that would be roughly Rs 3,000 crore."

"We are not here for a very opportunistic reason. We are here to see bank grow to its optimal potential and it has been a journey together. Two of our colleagues including myself and Gagan Banga are on the board and are very closely monitoring the bank. So OakNorth is a truly digital bank in UK and it is much more than just a commercial bank,” Mittal said.

"We are patient and we are going to wait till the initial public offering (IPO) which is going to be one-year away or something. So this has been commercially very rewarding investment, no doubt about it because at the time we sold one-third of a stake about a year and a half back, we recovered pretty much the entire investment we had made three years back along with some profit as a matter of fact. So now we are in no hurry to sort of offload this investment, we are going to wait,” said Mittal.

In terms of further capital raising exercise, he said, "At the moment there is no such plan as we do have adequate liquidity. We are sitting on close to Rs 23,000 crore of hard cash. At the moment, there is absolutely no reason for us to resort to any kind of capital raising. We have enough capital to keep going for at least another couple of years."

Last year, Indiabulls sold a part of its holding to the government of Singapore for Rs 900 crore.

First Published:Feb 8, 2019 12:16 PM IST