ICICI Bank Charging Card Customers For Payments At Branches

India's ICICI Bank says it will charge customers 100 rupees (US$2.30 or 1.50 euros) to pay credit card bills at bank branches. The bank will begin levying the charges on 1 June. "This is a charge levied by most banks on card customers paying at branches," Sachin Khandelwal, head of the bank's cards group, tells CardLine Global. "Customers can avoid this by adopting all other options" such as electronic payments, deposit boxes and debit transfers. Other banks in India already have established such charges. Standard Chartered, for instance, in 2006 began charging 99 rupees for cardholders paying bills at branches. "This is a new trend [that] has emerged in the Indian banking sector over the last couple of years," Prathima Rajan, an India-based analyst with Celent LLC, tells CardLine Global. "Banks consider this as an additional facility that they are providing to their customers and are hence charging a service fee. On the other hand, banks also want to move customers away from depositing cash and alternatively use checks and [electronic payments] to pay back their cards." ICICI has about 5 million credit card customers.