RBL Bank has tied up with Visa Worldwide (Visa) to issue credit cards enabled on the Visa payment network. The bank informed the stock exchanges that it had an exclusive agreement with the Mastercard network till the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) imposed restrictions on Mastercard Asia on July 14.
The bank had to tie up with Visa since Mastercard cannot onboard any new domestic customers (debit, credit or prepaid) on its card network from July 22.
The debit and prepaid cards issued by the bank are already enabled on different payment networks other than Mastercard.
The bank expects to start issuing credit cards on the Visa payment network after 8-10 weeks, during which the technology will be integrated.
The bank said its new issuances could face delays as it issues around one lakh new credit cards every month. The delay would last till either the early completion of the technology integration process with Visa or till RBI clears new credit card issuances on the Mastercard network.
RBL claims that it has around three million (30 lakh) credit card customers in India and is the fifth largest credit card issuer in the country with around five percent market share.
The central bank had, on July 14,
barred Mastercard from adding new customers in India for not following data storage rules.
Visa is the largest player in the cards space followed by Mastercard (which claims a premium positioning) and RuPay, according to industry estimates. RuPay, which accounts for nearly 35 percent of the cards market share, has a big proportion of debit cards.
(Edited by : Shoma Bhattacharjee)
First Published: Jul 15, 2021 5:19 PM IST
