Bandhan Bank launched an international debit card in association with Visa and started banking services for NRIs. The bank’s founder, managing director and chief executive — Chandra Shekhar Ghosh – said that the bank was ready to serve the Indian diaspora. These NRI accounts will be mostly for remittances from abroad. Ghosh foresees the demand coming from NRIs based out of London, the US and Europe. The move is in sync with the bank’s core philosophy of serving all strata of the population.
For the initial few months since its launch in August 2015, Bandhan bank offered only RuPay card to its depositors. The new international Visa debit card will be accepted globally at more than 30 million Visa merchants, both in-store or online, and will allow card holders to withdraw cash from 2 million ATMs located worldwide. The international card will have two variants — Visa Platinum and Visa Classic.
The Visa Classic Debit card will have a daily cash withdrawal limit of Rs. 40,000 while Visa Platinum Debit Card will have a daily cash withdrawal of Rs 1 lakh. The daily point of sale transaction limits for these two card variants will be at Rs 1 lakh and Rs 4 lakhs, respectively.
The NRI services will be offered at select branches and customer can open accounts either under standard or premium variants. Currently, the bank has a network of 612 branches and 203 ATMs across 27 Indian states, and caters to over 8 million customers. It has created a business of nearly Rs 20,000 crore including Rs. 7,000 crore of deposits. Its retail deposits account for one-third of the total business. It expects to add another 1 million new customers by March 2016.