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| The bank will launch a Visa credit card on October 20, on the occasion of its founders' day at Manipal. |
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| The bank has decided to charge an interest rate of 1.7 per cent on the revolving credit amount, which, it claims, is the lowest among the existing rates. |
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| B S Murthy, general manager (IT and HR), said the bank has weighed between MasterCard and Visa International before choosing the partner and favoured the latter because of its existing relationship with it in the debit cards business. "We can share the common infrastructure for both debit and credit cards." |
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| The card will be launched initially in Mumbai, New Delhi, Bangalore and Hyderabad, and later will be expanded to other cities. |
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| To lure more customers, the bank will not charge any entry fee for the first three months and will offer personal accident cover of up to Rs 5 lakh. |
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| To reduce the operational costs, it has decided to outsource the call center operations, billing, issuing and customer service support operations to Mumbai-based Venture Infotech. |
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| "Our staff will concentrate only on the marketing and sanctioning. We thought this is a more focused approach," Murthy said. |
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| Currently, the bank currently has about 20 million customers. It is targeting to tap a minimum of ten per cent of this base to sell its cards over a period of next twelve to eighteen months. |
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| "Our primary focus will be on the second-rung cities such as Mysore, Kochi, Vishakhapatnam and Bhopal where there is little presence of the existing card majors," Murthy said. |
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| The bank has formally launched its debit card in March and started marketing them since August. |
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| "We have issued 140,000 cards during the last ten weeks and are targeting to issue 3,00,000 cards by March 2004. Response to our debit card was good in second-rung cities such as Erode, Tirupur, Vishakapatnam and Vijayawada," Murthy. |
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| "The payment system in the country is changing rapidly, and we are aiming at gaining a substantial share in this fast-growing market," he added. |
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