HDFC Bank is planning to make up for its lost ground in the credit card business after the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) lifted the ban on the country’s top private lender to take on new card clients which it had imposed two years back.

Since the ban was lifted in August last year, the bank has made significant progress and is now looking to issue a million credit cards a month, which is double its current pace. 

For increasing spends on cards, the bank will announce partnerships across a range of industries from online retail to food delivery in the coming weeks.

“We focus not only on the issuance of cards which is a distribution game, but on deep engagement, ensuring customers find more value in their cards, and keep spending,” Parag Rao, country head for payments business, consumer finance, digital banking and marketing, told Bloomberg in an interview.

The partnerships in the next few weeks also include two airlines and a large hotel chain, according to Rao. 

HDFC Bank is in the final stages of developing a new digital credit card to pull in younger customers, he added.

The recovery for HDFC Bank has been swift since the eight-month long card ban was lifted in August last year, with the lender seeking to move past the punishment for repeated online glitches that hurt its customers, Bloomberg reported.

As per RBI data, HDFC Bank captured 29% of India’s overall spending on credit cards in October, the highest among its competitors.

Credit card usage has grown along with the exponential growth of e-commerce business in India. Between 200 million and 300 million Indians are expected to spend $50 billion on online retail this year, according to a Bain & Co Inc. report.

Part of the push at HDFC Bank will be tied to its merger with Housing Development Finance Corp., which will give it access to the mortgage lender’s customers, Rao told Bloomberg. The two firms agreed to combine this year in one of the biggest global deals to ride a boom in home loans and consumer spending in India.

Beyond partnerships, the bank also wants to attract more customers who use credit cards from India’s local retail payment system known as RuPay, Rao told Bloomberg. He sees recent rules that allow the linkage of RuPay credit cards to the widely used government-backed payment interface expanding the market for these cards.

“The credit lines for such customers will be small but these will be customers of the future, who can upgrade to other cards as they evolve,” Rao said.

And while peers are offering rewards on a slew of products to gain customers, HDFC Bank is avoiding this strategy, Bloomberg reported.

“We never have had the best discounts in the market nor do we want to be known as the card with the most discounts,” Rao said.