Best Credit Card in India Review of top 6 cards by Manish Chauhan

Most of the people who apply for a credit card in India, do not pay much attention at the time of taking the card, but later get frustrated by the card itself for various reasons high bad customer service , hidden charges and several other factors. The obvious question then is, which is the best credit card in India? We did a survey on credit cards and tried to do review of credit cards based on participants experiences . We will see how these cards rate in 6 important parameters. There were 654 participants who took the survey, hence you can safely assume that the collective responses will give a near reality results. If you see the chart above you will know that the 6 top credit cards in India are HDFC bank Credit Card ICICI Bank Credit Card CitiBank Credit Card SBI bank Credit Card Standard Chartered Credit Card HSBC Credit Card

6 factors to look at before you apply for Credit Card in India

Lets see those 6 parameters which you should look at before you apply for a credit card in India. At the end of this article, we will see the detailed results of the credit card survey and find out how different credit cards performed on each parameters, so that if some particular parameter is more important for you, you can just pick a card based on that parameter.

1. Interest rate charged on credit cards

The first parameter to look at while choosing a credit card can be the interest rate charged by the credit card company. It can range from 1.99% on cheapest credit card to as high as 3.5% per month on the most expensive credit card. For most of the people who pay their bills on time, this parameter will not matter much, but you never know when you might get into a debt trap kind of situation where you start using your credit card to the maximum limit and pay the interest per month, at that point of time this factor will really matter. Note that interest rate charged is mentioned on per month basis, but a small difference of 1% can be very big, considering it on yearly basis. For example a 1.99% monthly interest rate actually means 27% Yearly and 3.5% monthly means 51% yearly CAGR.

51% yearly CAGR ! means your Rs 1 lac of credit card d ebt can actually increase to 7.9 lacs in just 5 yrs if you dont do something about it and obviously you will run around to improve your cibil score later !

2. Annual Fees & Other charges

A lot of credit cards charge a yearly fees and renewal fees (at the time of renewal). Now a lot of people hold a Free credit card for lifetime, but thats just bunch of people who were given the credit card on a telemarketing call, mostly because they are working in some big company and chances are higher that their usage of credit card will be much higher than an average customer, hence the free credit card. But, lot of people apply for the credit card themselves and for them, there are yearly charges (annual fees) and other kind of charges which is applicable to everyone. For example , the penalty charges if you dont pay your dues no due date. There are tons of customers who do not pay their dues on last time and just pay the minimum payment. If this happens a lot of with you , then there is a great chance that you also live with the myth of minimum payments on credit cards. So apart from annual charges, there can be charges like Charges when you pay your credit card bill by cash in any bank branch If you make a demand draft from your credit card If you request for a duplicate statement And many other credit card charges .. the list is not a small one Note that if your credit card is FREE as of now, it might carry annual charges when it expires and you apply for renewal and credit card company says Sir , we gave it 100% free only till the card is valid, now its renewed !

3. Rewards and Offers on Credit Card

There are a lot of advantages of using a credit card in form of benefits and reward points. For example You get PAYBACK points which you can use to redeem at various places like www.bookmyshow.com, and book movie tickets by redeeming those points. You also get cash back benefits if you use the card at selected HPCL petrol pumps and you dont pay the fuel surcharge too. There are many other kind of benefits which many credit cards in India offer and those can be different from one credit card to another. This is one very important factor before you choose a credit card because a big number of people just take credit card for these benefits and even if you are not looking for these, you might want it in future at some point of time.

4. Customer Service and Transparency

Once I called my credit card company (which is ICICI Credit card) because I wanted to know, if there will be any annual charges on my credit card as the expiry date is over and I wanted to

renew the credit card. They gave me a very clear and satisfactory step by step answer which made me feel Great. There was no renewal charges and no annual charges even after renewal. So I was happy. Now it was not the FREE thing here which made me happy alone, It was the way customer care talked to me and treated me like a human. While there are instances when I was not that happy, but overall on an average I would still rate the customer service of my ICICI credit card as good. Well, thats my experience only and others can have bad or worse experience with Credit Card Company. Before you apply for a credit card, you need to look at this very critical aspects of customer service and how transparent are they overall.

5. Convenience to pay the bills

Something which you will deal each month is the payment of your credit card bill. Now almost all the credit card companies allow to pay by net-banking, cheque, cash and other ways. But still some banks can be really torturing and not that supportive. It can be cumbersome at times. There has been instances when people paid by cheque before time and it was not processed on time and the person had to suffer because of that and had to run around to get back those charges reversed. Here is the example I got the CIR and there is absolutely no big hiccups except one in ICICI bank credit card (I had lot of issues with this bank and some late payments od 1-7 days in some credit cards in very few months. Never listens customer and pathetic customer care executives) of which the DPD is consistently not (000) good for last 5 months. But hey it wasnt my fault. I dropped the cheque of overall due (about 12000/-) and they never bothered to inform me that my payment was not credited (god knows what they did with cheque). After 5 months when they made a balloon of charges and the whole amount jumped to 19000/- they called me and threatened me of CIBIL. I was never in the mood to not pay the due hence paid the whole amount 19000/- notified by them. Could this lead to this much low score?? Not to mention the unfair update on CIBIL report which affects you for years. So its a critical factor to look at before you apply for credit card in India.

6. How easy was it to apply for credit card

Have you gone through frustrating time applying for credit card, really had to run around to get a credit card even when you were totally eligible to get one. While this criteria is not that big, as its a onetime event still you can consider it before you apply for one. I recently had a hard time opening a saving account for my brother with ICICI bank because they had no way to accommodate people living on rent with friends, however Kotak bank did it for me, at that point of time, the ease of opening the account was really a big thing for me. In the same way ease of applying for a credit card can be one important factor at times.

Best & Worst Credit Card in India as per Survey

Below are the results of the survey which we conducted on credit cards. Have a look at it. If you look at the above chart you will see that the best credit card in India turns out to be Citibank Credit Card and the second best is HDFC Bank Credit card overall. However this does not mean that other credit cards are not good in all the parameters. ICICI Bank credit card is very close to all the other cards in several parameters. While the SBI Bank credit card and HDFC Bank credit card top the list when it comes to interest rates charged (means they have lower interest rates compared to others), but HSBC Bank credit card comes last. HBSC Bank credit card has not done good in any parameter as per the survey and has lowest ranking in all of them.

Average Credit Card bill for last 6 months

86% people are paying less than Rs 20,000 per month as their credit card bills, thats last 6 months average. Whereas only 2% people had more than Rs 50,000 bill per month. I suspect that these people must be using their credit card for various mandatory expenses which is required anyways.

Some more data out of credit card survey

Only 10% people had 4 or more credit cards Around 42% people had exactly 1 credit card with them The average number of credit cards held by one person was 2.03