About a week ago, a promising product decided to break things fast and then walk back quickly. It was the HSBC Premier Credit Card from the HSBC Credit Card stable.

HSBC Premier intended to exclude many categories effective April 1, 2025

The HSBC Premier Credit Card, which is only available to HSBC Premier Banking customers, was relaunched in late 2023. As part of the relaunch, the Bank offered 3 Reward Points per INR 100 spent, with no exceptions for card members. Everything earned the points: rent, taxes, and everything else.

However, as indicated in this post, it will change in the coming days. According to a new notice that HSBC rolled out, the following categories will not earn points as of April 1, 2025.

• Bail & Bond Payments (9223)
• Education & Government (9399, 8299, 8220, 8211, 8241, 8244, 8249, 9222, 9402, 9211, 9405)
• E-wallets (6540)
• Financial Institutions (6011, 6012, 6010)
• Fuel (5541, 5983, 5172, 5542, 5552)
• Jewelry (5944, 5094)
• Money Transfers (4829)
• Non-Financial Institutions (6051)
• Real Estate Agents & Managers (6513)
• Tax Payments (9311)

Even for the Utility (4900) & Insurance (6300, 5960) categories, spending only up to INR 1,00,000 per month will count towards the 3% Rewards.

While I understood the Bank’s perspective, this was terrible news for those who gravitated toward HSBC because of its no-questions-asked credit card rewards policy. With high-end banks such as HSBC and their HNI products, the sting to the bank is also high-end when people pay off, say, crores on the card in some of these spend categories and get a 3% return on those spends. Anyhow, it is about 6 weeks before this goes into effect.

HSBC Changes its mind and walks back these changes partly

As per a new communication sent by the Bank, they are now moving most of the categories into the INR 100,000 limit, which was going to include only Utilities and Insurance earlier. So now, the categories included for award of points per month of INR 100,000 would include the following:

• Bail and Bond Payments (9223)
• Education and government (9399, 8299, 8220, 8211, 8241, 8244, 8249, 9222, 9402, 9211, 9405)
• E-wallets (6540)
• Financial Institutions (6011, 6012, 6010)
• Jewelry (5944, 5094)
• Money Transfer (4829)
• Non-Financial Institutions (6051)
• Real Estate Agents and Managers (6513)
• Tax Payments (9311)
• Utilities (4900)
• Insurance (6300, 5960)

Fuel stays out of the ambit.

This is a sound move. The Bank was willing to pay up to 3000 points to customers for Utilities and Insurance. Now, they have expanded the categories but kept the amount the same so customers don’t go further out of pocket. I do hope, though, that they will relook at the limit and maybe make it 150-200K INR. I mean, an HNI will spend that much, at least in a month, without charging into the manufactured spending category, no?

Bottomline

HSBC Premier has returned some categories other banks disliked for the Premier Card, but with a cap that goes into effect on April 1, 2025. The categories include jewellery and education. The Bank will also pause Redemptions between March 31 and April 1, 2025, to implement a new redemption flow.

What do you make of the new changes being put in place by HSBC Premier?

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