Citigroup Inc expects to increase the number credit card customers it has in India by more than 20 percent a year over the next two to three years as it looks to boost its unsecured business portfolio in the country, a senior Citi executive said. The bank, which is building up its retail business in India, also expects to increase its personal loan portfolio by 30 percent a year over that period, Anand Selva, head of consumer banking for Citi in India, told Reuters on Monday.
Foreign banks in India including Citi slashed unsecured lending after personal loans and credit card debt turned bad following the global financial crisis in 2008. The banks have boosted unsecured lending over the past year to tap into a market where only about 17 million people out of a population of 1.2 billion use credit cards.
In China, more than 200 million people have credit cards, industry officials say. Many Indian consumers are yet to warm up to the idea of credit cards, preferring to use debit cards instead. Citi, one of the top three foreign commercial banks in India along with Standard Chartered and HSBC, has about 2.2 million credit card customers in India.
"We are very focused on building up our cards business," Selva, who ran Citi's consumer banking unit in China from 2008 before taking up the new role in India in July 2011, said after launching a new retail banking service in Mumbai. "I was quite surprised when I saw that there were only 17 million cards in India for a large population. That is very small. I do believe there is a huge opportunity in the country."
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