Central Bank Launches Electronic Card

The Central Bank of India, the first public sector bank in the country to launch the credit card way back in 1980, today launched its MasterCard Electronic card here.

The Central Bank MasterCard Electronic card, essentially a credit card, has been designed to work only at locations that have electronic data capturing (EDC) terminals and at MasterCard ATMs. The cards can not be accepted at non-terminalised merchant locations since all transactions have to be electronically read via the magnetic tape.

"The MasterCard Electronic card takes care of the problem of fraudulant usage of credit cards since all transactions have to be card read via an electronic terminal. We are targeting first time credit card users for the electronic card," Dalbir Singh, the chairman of Central Bank, said at the launch.

The bank has fixed an annual fee of Rs 400 for the card, but has decided to waive the fee for the first year. It has issued 16,000 cards on the first day, and has fixed a target of one lakh cards by the financial year end and three lakh cards by the next year end, Raghuraman, the general manager of the bank, said.

Sameer Vakil, country manager of MasterCard International, said the acceptance locations of electronic cards in the country are presently about 40,000 and this is expanding rapidly. The electronic card was launched by C Rangarajan, the governor of Andhra Pradesh.

Stating the bank's priority to upgrade the technology, the Central Bank chairman Dalbir Singh said all the 3,200 branches of the bank would have a technology touch by the fiscal end. " We will launch some more products in the next few months. We are upgrading the technology at our back office," Dalbir Singh said.

The bank is all set to achieve connectivity among 55 major branches in the next one month's time, added Raghuraman, the general manager.