HDFC Bank's loss is ICICI Bank's gain on credit cards: Check details here

The credit card market saw a big shift in the past few months after the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in December barred the country’s largest credit card issuer, HDFC Bank, from allotting new cards. 
 

Between December and May, HDFC Bank’s credit card kitty saw a drop of 528,447 cards while that of ICICI Bank increased 1.16 million, the highest by any lender during the period. While SBI Cards registered an increase of 661,950 cards, Axis Bank issued 243,527 more cards, the latest data shared by the RBI revealed. ICICI Bank’s co-branded credit card with e-commerce major Amazon has been one of the driving factors behind this gain as the bank on-boarded close to a million customers in the past nine months. How­ever, HDFC Bank recently said the embargo on issuing credit cards was temporary and it was laying the groundwork for getting back to the market “with increased rigour”, once the embargo was lifted. 

Other players such as RBL Bank, YES Bank, IndusInd Bank, and Bank of Bar­oda have increased their outstanding credit cards in the market. How­ever, certain big players such as Kotak Mahindra Bank, Citi Bank, and American Express have seen the outstanding credit cards in their portfolio decline. As far as American Express is concerned, the RBI ban­ned it from onboarding new customers from May 1 as it was found non-compliant with the directions on storage of payment system data, which the central bank had asked them to store in India.

Overall, outstanding credit cards in the market increased by 2.2 million, or 3.79 per cent between December and May to 62.3 million from 60.11 million. According to ICICI Securities report, the trends of spends in June till date indicate an 18 per cent jump compared to May. This puts June 21 spend trend at a higher level compared to all months of FY21, except March.