The Signal Was in the Data
Every quarter, the Reserve Bank of India publishes a dataset that almost nobody reads. It is called ATM & Card Statistics. It covers 64 banks and tracks 26 variables per bank — credit card transactions, debit card transactions, ATM withdrawals, PoS terminal counts, online spend, and more.
It has no narrative. It has no spin. It just has numbers. This quarter, I built a full analytical model on it. And one bank immediately stood out — not for good reasons.
What IndusInd's Numbers Actually Show
The peer comparison is what makes this remarkable. In the same 12-month window, HDFC grew its credit-card base. ICICI grew. Axis grew. SBI grew. Federal Bank — a smaller private bank — grew its base by 88%. IndusInd was the only top-10 bank to shrink.
Now, a bank can have fewer cards for legitimate reasons — strategic pruning of dormant accounts, tighter underwriting, deliberate derisking. That would be a reasonable management explanation.
But a −42% drop in online transaction value does not come from pruning dormant accounts. Dormant accounts do not transact. This is a drop in active spend: customers who had IndusInd credit cards used them significantly less in FY26 than in FY25.
You cannot explain away a −42% drop in online credit card spend with portfolio cleanup. That is behavioural.
Why It Matters Beyond IndusInd
RBI card data is a leading indicator for bank-level retail stress. When cardholders pull back, it's usually because the bank is restricting credit availability, or because customers are worried and spending less. The stock had already corrected sharply on the derivatives accounting controversy — but this data, sitting in a publicly available RBI PDF, was telling anyone willing to read it that the problem was not temporary.
The numbers do not have a PR department. They just tell you what happened.
The broader market context — the credit-card land grab, debit-card decline, the digital-cash crossover — is covered in the full report: The RBI Data Nobody Read. The bank-wise numbers are explorable in the FY26 dashboard (Bank Heatmap tab).
Sources: RBI ATM & Card Statistics, March 2025 / September 2025 / March 2026. Disclaimer: personal research, not investment advice. No position in IndusInd Bank at the time of writing.