Thaindian News

Kolkata, Sep 13 (IANS) SBI Cards, the second largest credit cards issuing firm in India, is expecting that its total asset base would be around Rs.2,700 crore at the end of this fiscal with issuing of about 575,000 new credit cards, a top company official said Thursday.

The firm, a joint venture between State Bank of India and GE Capital, currently has an asset size of Rs.2,500 crore.

“In the last financial year it (total asset base) was around Rs 2,200 crore. For the last few months the asset size growth has been tremendous because of corporate cards and increasing trends towards spends and a lot of festival offers given by the retailers,” SBI Cards chief executive officer Kadambi Narahari told media persons here.

“The trend of asset growth is very good. I will not be surprised if it grows up to around Rs.2,700 crore at the end of the current financial year,” Narahari said.

The standalone credit-card company made a big foray into corporate cards segment by issuing about 500 corporate cards already in this fiscal.

“Our target is 800 corporate cards in this fiscal. And in the next financial year, our target is to issue 1,200 corporate cards. This is basically for travel, holiday and entertainment spending, given with a corporate salary package,” the official said.

He said that despite a current overall slowdown in the economy, the company has witnessed increase in the number of issue of credit cards for a couple of months. In the last three months, it has issued on an average 48,000 cards in every month.

In the last financial year, SBI Cards issued about 400,000 cards. This fiscal, it expects to issue 575,000 new cards, of which about 20 percent will be in tier-II cities.

According to Narahari, spending per cards in the industry is about Rs.40,000 to Rs.45,000 annually and it is going up by about 10 percent to 12 percent every year reflecting inflation.

“In the festive months we see a trend of increasing spend of 20 percent to 25 percent per card,” he added.