India's credit card base at five-year high

Worldline India estimates credit card base at 20.3 million in FY14

India's credit card base may have topped 20 million in the just concluded 2013-14 (April-March) financial year - its highest level in the past five years -according to Worldline India, which provides services for critical electronictrans actions in the country.

Worldline India estimates that the credit card base increased by around four% to20.3 million during the year. This will be the second consecutive year of growth in credit card base with banks now appearing more confident to expand their unsecured retail loan portfolios.

"A second consecutive year of growth is encouraging, though the growth rate is likely to be slow in the short-term as the large issuers remain focused on profitability and will continue weeding out cards with lower activity," Deepak Chandnani, chief executive officer of Worldline India, said.

While the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) publishes data on cards, those statistics are released with a lag. The latest data released by the central bank showed therewere 18.8 million credit cards in the country at the end of November, 2013. HDFC Bank remained the largest issuer of credit cards with a base of 5.1million cards. While Worldline India expects HDFC Bank to remain the largest issuer in 2013-14, it expects the bank's share in the issued base to fall to 27% from 33 percent earlier. "ICICI Bank, State Bank of India (SBI) and Axis Bank have each grown their share by two%, growing faster than their competition," Chandnani said.

Worldline India also estimates that over 58 million debit cards were added during 2013-14, the highest ever in a year. It expects the debit card base to have touched 389 million at the end of March, 2014 compared to 331 million a year earlier.