Citibank India, a part of Citigroup, the world’s leading provider of financial services, today announced the launch of its nationwide festive season promotion “Citibank Most Wanted Brands Offer”. The promotion, beginning October 18 till December 31, brings together thirteen top brands across 12 different categories and enables customers to avail an assortment of assured gifts, Cash Back offers, discounts, rebates and sweepstakes on purchases made on their Citibank Credit and Debit Cards. Citibank’s partners in the promotion are Shopper’s Stop (retail) and Indiaplaza, a FabMall.com venture (e-Shopping), Hutch (mobile services) and Nokia (mobile phones), Jet Airways (air travel), Travel Guru (holidays), Gili (jewelry), Hewlett-Packard (computers and accessories), Philips and IFB (consumer durables), Reebok (footwear and accessories) Mitsubishi Cedia (automobiles) and The Grand (restaurants).

Asia-wide Credit Cardmember research points to scope in category expansion
Simultaneous to inauguration of the promotion, Citibank also released key findings of its latest seven-country Asia-Pacific Credit Card consumer research study.  Salient among these were findings that endorse Citibank’s success in founding and growing the credit card market in India by focusing on both geographical and category expansion through new, innovative and relevant products, sophisticated customer loyalty management, and alliances with leading brands:

· Almost 75% of cardmembers in India have more than one card and a little over a third have more than one plastic from the same institution. Therefore, increasingly the marketing battle is moving to one between plastics instead of between plastics versus cash.
· The average cardholder in India uses their credit card 3.1 times in the average week. This is only marginally lower than the Asian average of 4 times per week. This underscores the potential for card usage in India.  
· More than 55% of card users still use cash/debit cards more than credit card.
· The top two types of purchases that credit cards are used for in India are clothing/shoes and restaurants/fine dining.  Home electronics and travel/airfare or railway tickets are tied for third spot. This points to a significant opportunity to expand credit card usage in categories such as utility payments and for other smaller categories such as hospitals, education and grocery.
· The strong majority of cardmembers conceded the growing importance of owning a credit card in the light of more and more things being available online. A majority of Indian credit cardmembers expected that most of their purchases would be made online with a credit card in the next 5 years.

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