Despite a four per cent uptick in the industry, HDFC Bank, the market leader in the credit card space, massively lost its market share in the segment to the tune of 22.2 per cent to 27 per cent last fiscal, as rivals, especially the public sector banks increased their issuance and ate into its market share.
This is fall of a full 6 percentage points comes even as the industry as a whole grew 4 per cent in the year for the second consecutive year. As of November 2013, there were 18.7 million credit cards in the country, according to RBI data.
"While HDFC Bank continues to be the largest issuer of credit cards in the country, its share in the issued card base fell from 33 per cent to 27 per cent in FY14," Worldline, a payments and transactional services industry player which is a subsidiary of Atos, said in a report.
However, HDFC Bank's rival like ICICI Bank, Axis Bank and SBI saw their share growing by 2 percentage points in the space during the same period, the report said.
Private sector banks, including the foreign banks, were the market leaders in FY14, with a 54 per cent share of the overall credit cards in circulation.
According to the RBI data as of November 2013, the top five players controlled the credit card market with 14.68 million cards out of 18.7 million, in circulation between them.
The market leader HDFC Bank had 5.13 million cards, followed by ICICI with 3.09 million, SBI is the third slot with 2.76 million, followed by Citigroup with 2.40 million and Axis Bank with 1.31 million cards.
"After the Reserve Bank's recent EMV mandate, there was an uptick in issuance from the public sector banks, as a result of which their share has grown to 20 per cent from 18 last year," the report added.
