HDFC Bank partners with Paytm to ramp up credit card business

HDFC Bank on Monday announced its partnership with fintech giant Paytm to start selling co-branded credit cards ahead of the upcoming festive season. The partnership aims to regain lost ground in the credit cards segment by the bank. The credit cards will be powered by Visa and will include offerings targeted at millennials, business owners and merchants, an official statement said. While HDFC Bank has over 5 million debit, credit and prepaid cards, servings 2 million merchants through its offerings, on the other hand, Paytm has a reach of over 33o million consumers and 21 million merchants.

Partnership to increase spends

The largest private sector bank was banned from issuing new credit cards for over eight months as a penalty for frequent outages. Once the ban was lifted, it has outlined aggressive plans to regain lost market share within a year.

In order to achieve this target, the bank will focus on distribution partnerships, under which it envisages ramping up new credit card sales to Rs 5 lakh per month by end of this fiscal from Rs 3 lakh in November 2021.

Last month, HDFC Bank and Paytm had collaborated together on the payments side. Earlier, Paytm already partnered with US based Citi Bank under which co-branded credit cards are issued. However, Citi is looking to exit retail banking activities in the country.

Ahead of the festive season, the launch of HDFC Bank-Paytm co-branded cards is expected to increase the spends, the statement said. By December, a full suite of products will be available.

HDFC Bank’s group head for consumer finance Parag Rao called it as an attempt to enable consumption to fuel the economic growth and added that the bank is the largest player on both card issuing and merchant acquiring.

The bank’s stock was trading at 0.64% lower at Rs 1,573.15 at 13:00 hrs on BSE, as against a correction of 0.20% on the benchmark.