Welp, another promising product decides to break things fast and then walk back quickly. This time, it is the HSBC Premier Credit Card from the HSBC Credit Card stable.

HSBC Premier will exclude many categories effective April 1, 2025

HSBC Premier Credit Card, which is only available to HSBC Premier Banking customers of the Bank, was relaunched in late 2023. As a part of the relaunch, the Bank offered 3 Reward Points/INR 100 spent with no exceptions for the cardmembers. This meant everything earned the points: Rent, taxes and everything else.

However, this is being changed in the coming days. As per a new notice that HSBC has rolled out, the following categories won’t 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, the spends only up to INR 1,00,000 per month will count towards the 3% Rewards.

While I totally understand the Bank’s perspective, this is bad 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, let’s say, crores on the card in some of these spend categories and get a 3% return on those spends. Anyhow, about 6 weeks before this goes into effect.

HSBC will also introduce a new reward redemption flow

HSBC recently introduced an assortment of 20 transfer partners, first with the HSBC TravelOne Credit Card. The Bank is now adding these transfer features to the Premier Card as well. The Bank will pause redemptions on the app between March 15 – 31, 2025. They promise to come back with the following benefits:

• Instant rewards redemption
• Introduction of 20+ airline & hotel points transfer partners
• Expansion of rewards catalogue
• Easy tracking of reward points Click here to download the HSBC India Mobile Banking App if you don’t have it yet

As of April 1, 2025 then, the redemption ecosystem for HSBC will move to the app. And HSBC will be discontinuing credit card rewards redemptions across all other existing rewards redemptions channels including the HSBC PhoneBanking (IVR), Online Banking and HSBC Website.

Bottomline

HSBC Premier will be taking off some of the disliked categories by other banks for the Premier Card as well, by April 1, 2025. The categories include Jewellery and Education as well. 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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