Glaring lapses in Canara Bank’s credit card push

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Editor's note: Bengaluru-based Canara Bank wants to start a credit card subsidiary. With a base of 923,000 outstanding credit cards—second only to the State Bank of India among public sector lenders—it is well placed to do so. The launch of a separate unit to handle the credit card business would be the cherry on the cake for the bank’s CEO and managing director, Lingam Venkat Prabhakar, whose term ends in December. After all, it was under him that Canara Bank, in April 2020, took on the operations of Syndicate Bank—making it the fourth largest public sector bank in the country. While the merger has not exactly lived up to its billing—we flagged the friction between the Canara Bank cadre and the erstwhile Syndicate Bank cadre after the merger—the bank is now battling another major issue: massive procedural lapses in the issue of credit cards to customers. These range from missing customer applications for cards to missing credit information reports on credit card holders. All of which put the bank in clear contravention of the Reserve Bank of India’s norms for issuing credit …