Boom Times for Credit Cards in India

By Prabhakar Sinha, Times News Network

NEW DELHI: The credit card industry in India has never had it so good. In its 15 years of doing business in this country, it had issued 2.69 crore cards till December 2003. And now in just one year, 2004, that figure skyrocketed to 4.33 crore.

The rise is visible also in the number of transactions using cards and their value. From 14.57 crore transactions in 2002-03, the number rose to 21.19 crore in just the first nine months of 2004-05. The amount involved in these transactions also shot up from Rs 26,951 crore to Rs 44,737 crore.

Behind the story of this dizzy growth is a tale of aggressive marketing, tall promises and a tribe of outsourced marketers called direct selling agents (DSAs). This is the tribe that’s on your phone virtually every day, urging you to buy this card or the other, indeed, often promising the moon and, not surprisingly, failing to deliver.

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