Over the months, a severe bug remained live on the much-talked-about offering from Axis Bank Credit Cards, their top-of-the-line Axis Reserve Credit Card. However, this bug today has been fixed.

Axis Bank’s Reserve Credit Card bug

As a recap, Axis Bank shot into prominence with their Credit Cards on two counts in 2022. Firstly, they added a 25,000 points bonus every month on the Axis Magnus Credit Card (read review) in February 2022. Then, they added transfer partners to Axis Bank Edge Rewards later in the year.

Returning to the Reserve, Axis Bank’s top-end lifestyle focussed card offers Golf benefits for the members and 15 ER points/INR 200 spent, which is 125% of what we earn on the Magnus. Besides, it offers an array of annual benefits, 2x points on international spending and 50,000 points for every year you keep the card.

One of Axis Bank’s not-so-strong-suites has been that their IT backend still needs to be sorted for the kind of scale they have seen. This is why the points credits happen in fits and starts rather than continuous and daily.

Axis Bank Reserve has been granting a bonus every time someone reissued a card (call the bank to block the card and request a replacement), seeing it as a new card. Unfortunately, people who realised have been using this to generate an unlimited supply of points, which does not even require them to do any manufactured spending.

Axis Bank shuts the door on the loophole.

The bug cost the card issuer real money to credit these points every time they were used, and at some time, it would have caught the eye of the people who run the cards division or the auditors. As a listed entity, this would be irresponsible to leave the loophole unattended.

The problem became too big for Axis Bank to look away from at some point, and they realised they needed to fix it pronto. Today, Axis Bank has rolled back all the erroneously issued points to customers who have been repeatedly using the card and replacing it. Consequentially, this has also left some accounts in the negative.

To my memory, this is the first time something to this effect has been done, and it would have been a joint effort of the Corporate Security and Credit Card teams. Users who used the bug repeatedly should be relieved that this is where it has stopped (for now). In the US, the issuers have gone to great lengths sometimes to establish a pattern of abuse and do more to go after them rather than just debit the points. We will see how much further they go in this case.

Bottomline

Axis Bank has done a solid to its stakeholders (cardholders, shareholders and management) and closed a loophole that has existed for a long time. The Axis Reserve Credit Card used to automatically grant bonus points for those who replaced their cards, and this has now been plugged. Not just that, the points generated by the bug have also been reversed by Axis Bank.

What do you make of Axis Bank Reserve reversing the points on their bug? 

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