Snapdeal To Launch Co-Branded Credit Cards With Bank Of Baroda

Walmart-backed Indian ecommerce giant Snapdeal, in partnership with Bank of Baroda Financial and NPCI, will launch a co-branded RuPay credit card. The credit card will feature contactless payments and will be rolled out for users by March this year.

The joint effort is aimed at popularising the adoption and usage of credit cards among online buyers from India’s smaller cities and towns. The deal will help Snapdeal leverage Bank of Baroda’s distribution network in widening credit card penetration among such cities.

The co-branded contactless card will provide a range of reward points and benefits to the cardholders – both on Snapdeal and at other offline transaction points.

The deal is likely to strengthen Snapdeal’s efforts to acquire new users as the ecommerce platform receives over 72% of its orders from Tier 2+ cities and towns. Bank of Baroda and NPCI too, being government entities, are focused on increasing credit card penetration in India’s growing non-metro cities

Speaking on the occasion, Snapdeal president Himanshu Chakrawarti said, “Just like Snapdeal, both Bank of Baroda & RuPay have a deep connection with users in Bharat. The synergies of this partnership will help accelerate the adoption of digital payments, especially amongst users living beyond India’s metros and Tier 1 cities.”

The contactless card will also feature added safety measures including NPCI Tokenisation System (NTS) for safe online shopping. The NTS supports the tokenisation of RuPay cards to further enhance the safety of customers during online transactions.

Nalin Bansal, chief of corporate & fintech relationships and key Initiatives, NPCI said, “Through this partnership, digital consumers will be able to own and experience the power of RuPay Contactless Credit Card fulfilled through an efficient and quick onboarding experience.”

This comes barely a month after the Union Cabinet cleared the INR 1,300 Cr proposal to incentive transactions through RuPay debit cards and BHIM-UPI transactions. 

The launch of the co-branded credit card is part of a major upheaval at Bank of Baroda-BoB Financial. In December last year, it partnered with OneCard, to launch a co-branded mobile-first credit card. In November too, BoB Financial Solutions Limited (BFSL) joined forces with NPCI to launch BoB Credit Cards on the RuPay platform, last year. 

Snapdeal and BoB join a coterie of other players in the co-branded credit card space. Earlier, in 2019, Flipkart launched its co-branded credit card with Axis Bank, powered by MasterCard architecture. In October last year, Paytm, too in partnership with HDFC, launched a comprehensive range of credit cards powered by VISA.

The new entrant in the field could help increase the penetration of credit cards in Tier 2 cities and towns and could help in the adoption of the financial instrument in non-metros.