SBI Cards and Payment Services is seeing over 50% of its transactions come from online payments such as on groceries, utility bills, insurance premium. The only pure play credit card company to be listed on the Indian bourses expects this trend to go up further as point of sale purchases are yet to pick up.

“Particularly within SBI Card, now, more than 53% of the spends actually come from online payments which used to be around 44% earlier. Almost 9 percentage points improvement is there mainly in terms of the categories like for groceries, apparel, utility bill payment, insurance premium, online education,” SBI Card MD and CEO Rama Mohan Rao Amara told news agency PTI.

For these kind of categories, suddenly the company has seen kind of an increase in spends online. “We believe (it) will remain online because once people get used to the comfort of it, they will continue with that. So, Covid or no-Covid, it will not impact that,” Amara told PTI.

SBI Card is seeing an emerging trend of securing more customers from non-metro locations. Maybe till 5-6 years ago, tier-I locations were contributing majorly to the credit card industry growth.

“But, if you look at our recent performance, around 58% of our incremental sourcing is actually coming from non-tier cities that is tier II, III and IV. “These are contributing more to our new credit card acquisitions, that is basically we have a piggyback of our parent bank (SBI) customer base,” he added.

Amara said the company will continue to work with its parent bank. “If you look at the customer base of our parent bank, it is more than 400 million. We have hardly explored the base of around 20-22%. So, there is a plenty of runway left.”