Ambassadors are also not safe from credit card frauds

AK pandey, Ambassador, lives in GK-1, Delhi, complained that someone misused his sbi credit card. Who recently purchase 10gm gold coin in amritsar. Person name who used his credit card his name is satinder singh, resident of Guru Nanak Colony, Amritsar.
When Delhi police reached Amritsar and traced the address but it was found to be fake. The phone number given by indict at the time of the online booking was switched off. Police got new phone number from the online company and a trap was laid near the post office in Amritsar with the help of local police. After a long wait, he came to collect the package. While receiving the package, he was caught red-handed," said addl CP (Southeast) Ajay Chaudhry.
His real name is Avtar Singh. The gold coin was found in the packet. He further told the cops that he had used the same method earlier to buy valuable items online. The police team recovered four gold coins of 2 grams each and one Dell desktop computer from his house. Singh has been sent to judicial custody.

SBI the most trusted credit card brand

SBI Card has been voted as the most trusted brand in the credit card category in Reader’s Digest Asia Trusted Brands Survey, for the third year in a row.
Accepting the award, Abhay Kumar Singh, CEO, SBI Cards & Payment Services Pvt. Ltd, said, “We have consistently invested in new technologies and introduced new service offerings to make life simple for our customers. We are delighted that our customers have voted us as the most trusted credit card brand for the third year in a row.”
SBI Card has focused on customers-centric initiatives and offerings over the past decade. The recently concluded 250 service camps were one such initiative that helped SBI Card proactively reach out to 2,10,000 customers in 31 cities in India. SBI Credit Card is the only credit card company in India that offers customers the ease of 13 different modes of payment. Last year, SBI Card won several Indian and Asian awards including the most trusted brand in credit card category in the Reader’s Digest Asia Trusted
Brands 2009 Survey, a consumer choice award from CNBC Awaaz and ‘Asia’s Best Mature Captive Services Delivery’ award from the Shared Services Outsourcing Network (SSON).

Jet Airways associates with SBI Credit Cards to offer simple payment option

Jet Airways, India’s premier international airline, today announced a tie-up with SBI Card the joint offering from State Bank of India and GE Capital, to offer its guests a unique travel option.
This arrangement is aimed at making air travel more affordable for guests across India. Jet Airways’ guests can now opt to convert their air tickets purchased on www.jetairways.com, using an SBI Credit Card into a zero % equated monthly installment (EMI).
Under this offer, SBI Credit Cardholders would be able to choose an option to convert their ticket purchases on jetairways.com into a zero percent EMI with tenure of 6 months.
Mr. Sudheer Raghavan, Chief Commercial Officer of Jet Airways, said “Jet Airways is committed to significantly enhance the travel options available for all its guests, with an eye on convenience. The tie up with the SBI Card is another unique travel option aimed at making air travel more economical and cost-effective for family travel. This new scheme bears testimony to our customer-centric approach wherein Jet Airways’ has time and again created products catering to the specific travel needs of our guests.”
This scheme will help a family to undertake visits to tourist spots and encourage domestic tourism, he further added.
“We are delighted to partner with Jet Airways and offer SBI Card holders an affordable travel option. This offering is in line with our focus on the travel segment as it enables air travelers a unique opportunity to fly now and pay later without any additional costs.,” said Mr. Abhay Kumar Singh, CEO, SBI Cards & Payment Services Pvt. Ltd.

Credit card records decline by almost 50 lac in a year

Even as the economy is back on track and consumer confidence up, the number of credit cards in the system continues to dip. In the last one year, the total number of credit cards in use has dipped by almost 50 lakh.
According to the latest data released by RBI in its monthly bulletin, the number of credit cards dipped to just about 2 crore as of end February 2010 from around 2.5 crore a year ago. The data also indicates that average monthly card spends both in terms of value as well as volume have still not touched the pre-crisis (prior to Lehman collapse) levels.
Average monthly spend in FY10 has fallen to Rs 5,100 crore against Rs 5,400 crore in FY09. While average monthly volumes in the current year has been just 1.94 crore a month compared with 2.16 crore a month in FY09. Even peak festival spending through cards in the current fiscal is less than the previous year’s levels. ICICI Bank, the largest card issuer had around 8.5 million cards outstanding at its peak, which has now fallen to around 5 million. While for SBI credit card, the number has dipped from 3.5 million to 2.8 million.
The fall in cards is surprising as banks have started disbursing unsecured loans like personal loans, post crisis, in the past few months. Even credit cards outstandings are treated as unsecured lending by banks. Some large credit card issuers like ICICI Bank, SBI Card, Citi and even smaller issuers like ABN Amro and Barclays have either slowed down or cut their outstanding cards. Only few players like HDFC credit Card and Standard Chartered have seen a nominal growth in their numbers.
Pralay Mondal, country head (retail assets & credit cards), HDFC Bank, said: “Lot of attritions are happening in the system as loss ratios had gone up. Banks are not adding as much new customers. As new customer acquisitions are lower than attritions, the overall numbers are falling. Previously, the number of new customers were higher. We are currently doing around 80,000-90,000 new credit cards a month and our losses are much lesser than industry.” Currently, HDFC Bank has close to around 5 million credit card customers while StanChart has around 1.4 million customers.
Adds Shyam Srinivasan, Country Head — Consumer Banking, Standard Chartered Bank: “StanChart has kept its numbers flat for a while now. We have increased our share in the business. Some of them had overdone themselves and now they are letting go of customers. It’s a normal process. As they were hit by high credit losses, they are trying to clean up.”
According to Abizer Diwanji, executive director of Corporate Finance, KPMG India, “Today, nobody is expanding on the card portfolio except in the debit card space. The cost of merchant acquisition is tremendously high. The maintenance of delivery of credit card is high compared to a personal loans. It’s a far more cumbersome job.”
One of the biggest problems facing the industry has been the rise in bad debts in the past few years. However, this seems to have stopped and bankers say there has been a drop in bad debts in the past few months. Sources said the overall credit card losses for the industry have now come down to 15-16% against around 18% earlier. However, even at these rates, most issuers are still making losses.

loyalty rewards schemes to raise Debit and Credit Card spends

Banks are gradually more looking at offering rewards or points on Debit and Credit card transactions in an attempt to attract more customers and raise card usage.

State Bank of India, launched a loyalty programme for its debit card customers in April 2009. Punjab National Bank is also setting up to launch a similar programme for its credit card customers in the next three to four months.

Loylty Rewards, the loyalty and rewards management company which formulated and implemented SBI's programme, is also working with Deutsche Bank and Citibank which are likely to announce their programmes within the next two or three months.

SBI's reward programme offers customers the option to redeem the points earned for using their debit cards with over 35 retail brands which include electronic brands, apparel, jewellery and also for booking movie tickets, bus tickets and air tickets.

The life of the points is also longer with a window of three years, during which customers can redeem the points. Future plans include tying up with mobile companies to offer redemption of points against mobile talk time, Mr Jayaraj said.

Deputy Managing Director (Information Technology), SBI, Mr A. Krishna Kumar, said that the programme was launched to give an incentive for customers to use cards.

“After launched the programme both the usage of debit cards and the demand for debit cards have increased. We don't plan to discontinue the scheme,” he said. Prior to the scheme, SBI had a debit card base of 5.1 crore. This has now increased to 6.8 crore. The average number transactions through point-of-sales terminals (swiping of cards at merchants) has gone up from 12.9 lakh a month, to 21.7 lakh a month. Similarly, the average spends have increased from Rs 2.1 crore a month to Rs 3.7 crore a month. “Consumer loyalty and relationship management is a relatively new area in India. In fact, over the last decade, ‘customer connect' has been disintegrating with more brands and more merchants entering the market,” said Mr Jayaraj. PNB's rewards scheme is still in the preliminary stage and the bank is yet to decide on which merchants to tie up with, said a senior official from the bank. “We need to get customers to increase spends. So, we will look at merchants who are popular with customers,” said an official from the credit cards venture division of PNB.
The bank, which launched credit cards a year ago, has 41,000 credit card customers.

The target is to increase this to 50,000 by March and add 2 lakh credit card customers next fiscal, said Mr Ranjan Dhawan, Chief General Manager, PNB.

Aditya Birla Group, SBI Card partner to offer Co-branded Credit Card

Aditya Birla Group and SBI Card today announced a partnership to offer co-branded credit cards to all customers of the Aditya Birla Group companies. This was announced today by Ajay Srinivasan, Chief Executive, Financial Services, Aditya Birla Group, and Diwakar Gupta, Chief Executive Officer, SBI Card.
The Aditya Birla Group - SBI co-branded credit card will be available to over 28 million customers of Aditya Birla Group companies, namely Aditya Birla Retail, Aditya Birla Financial Services Group (which includes Birla Sun Life Insurance & Birla Sun Life Mutual Funds), IDEA and Madura Garments. The initiative will be led by the financial services arm of the Aditya Birla Group – Aditya Birla Financial Services.
"The Aditya Birla Group already has a strong presence in the financial services business, as a significant player in the non bank space. And we are committed to meet all the felt and unfelt financial needs of our target customer. Today, we take yet another step in that direction, with the signing of a MOU with SBI Card, to offer a co-branded credit card to the customers of the Aditya Birla Group. Customers are our biggest asset and with a base of over 60 million customers, group wide, we wish to leverage this initiative across the Group. Towards this end, companies pan the Group have come together. And we are very proud to have SBI Card as our partner." said Ajay Srinivasan, Chief Executive, Financial Services, Aditya Birla Group.
“We are pleased to partner with the Aditya Birla Group.  Through this tie-up we will be able to tap the varied customer segments of the Aditya Birla Group and offer them a relevant value proposition across all retail ventures of the Aditya Birla Group. Bringing new products that offer greater value to our customers has been an ongoing endeavor for us at SBI Card" said Diwakar Gupta, Chief Executive Officer, SBI Card.
The card will be made available across more than 2000 retail outlets of Aditya Birla Group companies.
Other Products From Sbi are :-

1. SBI Home Loan
   
2. SBI Credit Card
3. SBI Personal Loan