ABN Amro Bank NV has cut the spending limits for some of its credit card customers to a tenth of the previous limits, reports local newspaper The Times of India, which also says the bank has raised the minimum monthly payment amount to 7% of the outstanding balance from 5% previously.
A spokesperson from the Mumbai-based bank would only tell PaymentsSource the cuts are “in line with standard industry practices.”
However, the newspaper speculates the measures could be part of an initiative to get more customers to surrender their cards to make closing the credit card business easier as the bank draws closer to selling its retail operations to UK-based Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corp.
PaymentsSource reported last month that the Royal Bank of Scotland NV (which owns ABN’s assets in India) had decided to discontinue issuing new ABN Amro credit cards or unsecured loans in India
ABN Amro has seen the annual revenue of its consumer-finance division drop from 23 billion rupees (US$496.7 million or 364.7 million Euros) in 2008 to roughly 12 billion rupees in 2009. It approximately 1.3 million credit cardholders as of March 2009, according to India-based payments processing firm Venture Infotek. The issuer now has about 1 million cardholders, Mrinalini Manral, an analyst with Mumbai-based research firm Dassler Business Intelligence, had told PaymentsSource earlier.
